Abell Foundation

For nearly a quarter-century, Mike Drocella has made a living amid the steamy furnaces at the Carr Lowrey Glass Co. on the banks of the Patapsco River, just like his father before him.Enduring as it had been, Drocella's was a way of life under threat -- a threat that grew more ominous last year as the 110-year-old company, lagging behind its competition, struggled to find a buyer.That is, until an unlikely investor entered the picture: Baltimore's Abell Foundation.Recruiting partners to help manage the investment and the company, the nonprofit foundation put up $7 million to buy Carr Lowrey last year.

THE ABELL Foundation has come up with a radical suggestion for improving the quality of teaching in Maryland: essentially eliminate teacher certification - or, more precisely, drop the college coursework required for licensing. In a long-awaited 109-page report released Monday, the Baltimore-based foundation said there is no evidence that teachers who take the required college courses for certification perform better in the classroom than those who don't. So why require all those courses if a philosophy major or a midlife career-changer can teach as well as an education major?

Baltimore is a hotbed of cybersecurity jobs, with more than 13,000 job postings last October alone, according to a report funded by the Abell Foundation. "This growth has created an urgent need for qualified individuals to fill current job openings and to develop the skilled workforce necessary to address the expected dramatic job growth in the future," says the report, announced Thursday. The region's job openings put it behind only Palo Alto and San Francisco, both in California, among eight regions commonly thought of as cybersecurity powerhouses, according to the report.

Pixelligent Technologies, a maker of miniscule crystal additives used in electronics and plastics products, said Friday it has raised more than $5.1 million in new funding from the Abell Foundation and others. The funding will allow the Baltimore company to increase manufacturing capacity and hire application, engineering and business development employees, Pixelligent said. The company, which got its start in a College Park incubator, now has more than 30 commercial customers and hopes to open additional plants in Baltimore, Pennsylvania and Delaware.

A Baltimore charitable foundation is joining Maryland's main technology development agency to create a $3.3 million investment fund to pump money into new tech startups in the city, officials plan to announce Tuesday. The Abell Foundation is investing $3 million into the newly created Propel Baltimore Fund, with another $300,000 coming from the Maryland Technology Development Corp., a quasi-state agency. The fund will make small, otherwise known as "angel," investments, typically ranging from $50,000 to $100,000, but up to a maximum of $220,000 per company.

JUST OVER A decade into Maryland's experiment with educational reform on the grand scale, the other shoe has finally dropped. A $300,000 study of the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program paid for by Baltimore's Abell Foundation casts a giant shadow of doubt on the reformist agenda currently dictating educational practices across our state. The professors engaged by the foundation to evaluate MSPAP twitted the program for its weak academic content and inexpert scoring procedures, concluding that students utterly bereft of content knowledge routinely pass the tests merely by concocting their essays in the approved format.

Two private organizations announced separate initiatives yesterday to pay for programs designed to revamp the Baltimore Police Department, reduce crime and cut the city's homicides substantially by the end of 2002.The Abell Foundation is paying $140,000 to a team headed by crime consultants Jack Maple and John Linder to study police operations and implement a new crime-fighting strategy. The consultants are already at work at the behest of Mayor-elect Martin O'Malley.The Greater Baltimore Committee -- a group of business leaders who challenged the community to cut the city's annual 300-plus homicides in half in two years -- is giving the city's Safe and Sound Campaign $145,000 to pay for a special prosecutor and surveillance equipment.

Baltimore City Community College took out a word-packed, half-page ad in The Sun yesterday, starting an advertising campaign to improve the school's image after a recent report criticized low student achievement and inadequate leadership. The ad acknowledges some of the problems - that the school has the lowest graduation and transfer rates of any of the state's community colleges - but also praises advances such as more online courses and computer programs, which are designed to help more students pass remedial courses.

In contrast to a report released last week by the Abell Foundation, CareFirst Blue- Cross BlueShield yesterday presented consultants' recommendations supporting its plans to convert to for-profit status and sell itself to another insurer. The report did not examine CareFirst's announced intention to sell itself to WellPoint Networks Inc. for $1.3 billion, although the deal fits with what the consultants recommended. The new report, from Accenture Ltd., says that with a conversion and sale, "CareFirst would benefit from a substantial increase in scale and capital access."

A Baltimore-based foundation has given city police a grant worth up to $350,000 to pay for DNA testing of evidence gathered from homicides and other violent crimes -- money that could help detectives make a dent in a backlog of 5,000 unsolved cases. The grant by the Abell Foundation follows revelations last week that city police and ABC News' 20/20 entered into an agreement to pay $8,750 each to test 50 "cold" cases. The tests have resulted in six DNA matches that led to the arrests of two men charged in violent crimes, including a 1989 homicide, police said.