Robert “Bob” Benjamin, longtime Baltimore Curriculum Project (BCP) Board member, passed on February 28, 2024.
A trusted and talented journalist, Bob was retired as senior editor at T. Rowe Price Group at the time of his passing. He had an impressive and impactful newspaper career, spending 25 years at The Baltimore Sun as a reporter, foreign correspondent and editor. He was relentless as a reporter and editor, inspired and driven by his curiosity about the world. His career and his volunteer focus embraced his tenacity, talent and love of bringing to light the world’s stories.
Bob was an outstanding board member and friend, and we will miss him very much. He has left a legacy to BCP, though, with the Robert Benjamin Award for Excellence in Direct Instruction Reading, for which he left an endowment, and an energized Education Committee which he chaired up to a few months before his passing.
Bob joined the BCP Board in December 2015, bringing a deep knowledge of the region’s educational challenges and national trends to the Education Committee. During his time at the Sun, Bob was the lead education writer. In 1981, Bob wrote “Making Schools Work, A Reporter’s Journey Through Some of America’s Most Remarkable Schools”, which was favorably reviewed by The New York Times, and which featured Direct Instruction Author Sigrfied Engelmann.
In his book and articles, he discovered and championed the power of Direct Instruction, a research-based reading instruction program, which BCP pioneered with Baltimore City Public Schools in 1996. Last spring, as noted above, he endowed the Robert Benjamin Award for Excellence in Direct Instruction Reading to recognize a BCP teacher who excels at teaching Direct Instruction reading. The annual award comes with a cash prize of $3,000. The first recipient, Christa Kinsey, teaches 3rd grade at City Springs Elementary/ Middle School.
Read more about the Robert Benjamin Award for Excellence in Direct Instruction Reading.
Bob began his career at the now-closed Cincinnati Post, receiving advanced training in education issues through a Ford Foundation Fellowship. From 1990 to 1994, he lived in Beijing to cover one of The Sun’s most challenging beats including the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. In his retirement, Bob brought his dogged approach to politics, elected to a four-year term on the Baltimore County State Democratic Central Committee from legislative District 12 in 2018. As president of the Baltimore County Progressive Democrats Club, he led that group’s notable growth and was named “Baltimore County’s “Democratic Advocate of the Year” in 2019.
Read Bob’s Baltimore Sun obituary.
