The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future is a wonderful thing. It’s a multibillion-dollar “investment” in Maryland’s Public Schools … that is resulting in the elimination of teaching positions and increasing classroom sizes.
Brilliant! Now that’s what I call a wise investment.
Unfortunately, things are going to get worse.
Blueprint costs are projected to soar from $1.6 billion in Fiscal Year 2024 to over $4 billion annually, potentially requiring more than $30 billion in new state/local tax dollars by the end of the decade.
According to the Teachers Association of Baltimore County, Baltimore County Public Schools is planning to cut nearly 600 positions next year, hundreds of them classroom teachers.
But Gov. Wes Moore is celebrating because a few years ago, there were over 2,000 teacher vacancies. There are about 1,000 vacancies currently.
Of course, if you’re eliminating teaching positions by the hundreds, reducing the vacancy rate isn’t all that difficult, is it?
The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future is busting budgets across the state. Maryland’s “investment” in its public schools is being funded in large part by forcing local jurisdictions to pick up the cost of mandates the state can’t afford to pay itself.
Local jurisdictions are left with few choices: raise taxes, cut services or do both.
Further, as Blueprint costs mushroom, popular school programs that are not mandated by the Blueprint are increasingly at risk as programs the Blueprint does mandate begin crowding out everything else.
In Carroll County, the superintendent regularly recommends closing Outdoor School as a way of offsetting rising costs related to the Blueprint.
One of these years, it’s going to happen.
It’s quite a racket the state has going on. It spends billions of dollars it doesn’t have, and makes the counties pay for it. By forcing local jurisdictions to raise their taxes, progressive lawmakers in Annapolis are able to claim they balanced Maryland’s budget without having to raise state income taxes.
That’s what passes for honesty in Annapolis these days.
Making matters worse, the Blueprint is wholly inappropriate for many of Maryland’s counties. It’s the same oppressive one-size-fits-all, top-down approach to education that has proven ineffective for years.
Honestly, how bad do things have to get before we finally acknowledge that the way we are educating children in this country isn’t working anymore?
We keep doubling down on the same failed approach. The Blueprint is just the latest in a series of educational reforms that transformed Maryland from a state with localized control of education to one that is highly centralized, with a funding formula intentionally designed to disadvantage Maryland’s suburban and rural counties.
There was a time when Maryland schools were run by local elected officials, who resided in the communities and knew the students they served.
Today, an army of state bureaucrats, who don’t know “Bullock’s from Baugher’s,” are in control, which probably has as much to do with ensuring the imposition of progressive social values on local populations as it does with anything having to do with teaching children how to read and write.
The Blueprint, like all the billion-dollar plans that came before it, is doomed to fail, but if history is any guide, it won’t be long before Maryland scraps it and replaces it with something new. By always focusing on “the next great thing,” politicians are able to escape responsibility for “the last great thing” that failed to meet expectations, despite having broken the bank to pay for it.
Every few years, politicians decide something really should be done to improve the education students are receiving in public schools, so government gets to work, taxing the citizenry and giving the money it collects to an educational bureaucracy, which always claims to know just what to do with the money.
With great fanfare, the newest billion-dollar program is rolled out with promises of transformational change. One more magic bullet that will achieve what no prior plan has been able to accomplish.
The hard truth is, the Blueprint does exactly the opposite of what it should be doing. It takes decision-making as far away from students as possible, placing it in the hands of bureaucrats in Baltimore and Annapolis. Teachers, principals, even local boards of education now must simply do what they’re told. For many Maryland counties, what they’re being told to do makes no sense for the students they serve.
But the most galling aspect of the Blueprint is its claim that its overriding purpose is to improve the quality of education for children “who have been historically underserved,” yet Maryland continues to force historically underserved children to remain in schools that have failed them for far too long.
People of means can afford to send their children to a school of their choice, a school that they believe matches their child’s particular learning style, but the underserved are forced to remain in the school the state tells them they must attend, no matter how bad that school may be.
If society is looking to keep the underserved at a disadvantage relative to their peers, forcing them to attend failing schools is a good way to go about it.
Still, Democrats remain dead set against giving minorities and other disadvantaged groups a way out of the failing schools their children are being forced to attend.
But why? Why is school choice anathema to democrats? The reason has nothing to do with what’s in the best interest of children.
The education bureaucracy is a core constituency of the Democratic Party, and that constituency wants nothing to do with school choice.
It’s pure politics.
With the Blueprint, Maryland’s Democratic lawmakers have opted to keep things pretty much the way they are, spending billions of dollars tweaking around the edges of a system that is hopelessly outdated and ineffective.
We need to move decision-making closer to students.
We need to unshackle our teachers and school administrators from the bureaucratic restraints that tie their hands.
We need to give principals the freedom to run their schools in a way that aligns with the needs of their learning communities rather than requiring them to blindly follow one-size-fits-all state dictates, even when those dictates clearly make no sense for the students and families they serve.
We need to respect teachers enough to give them the freedom to meet the learning needs of the students they have sitting in front of them without interference from state bureaucrats, who know nothing about their students but feel free to tell teachers exactly how to do their jobs.
And for the sake of equity, we need to give all families the right to choose the school that is best for their children, instead of reserving that right solely for people who can afford it.
Chris Roemer resides in Finksburg. He can be contacted at chrisroemer1960@gmail.com.
