Poll: Most oppose more spending for education

On Wednesday, we suggested that you not take too seriously a Goucher College poll that indicates Marylanders want to spend more money on education.

Subsequently, we learned about another poll that says the exact opposite and thought you should know about it, too.

We wonder how much attention “the mainstream media” will pay to a Maryland Public Policy Institute poll that suggests our state’s residents don’t support a bigger education budget.

Not much was made of it at the time it was released in April 2018. Certainly it didn’t get front-page headlines ... not in a state dominated by politicians and other enlightened souls who believe that the taxpayers deserve all of the government that money can buy.

The public institute pole was mentioned Wednesday morning in MarylandReporter.com’s daily summary of what’s going on in the Free State.

It indicated that 72% of Marylanders say the state should allocate school spending more efficiently and effectively, rather than increase the education budget (which agrees with what we said Wednesday).

Maryland already is spending about $7 billion annually on public education, and the Kirwan Commission has recommended that it increase K-12 education funding by another $3.8 billion each year.

By comparison, the state of West Virginia’s entire fiscal budget for 2020 amounts to about $4.6 billion. Maryland’s population is a little more than three times that of West Virginia (6 million to 1.8 million), but its budget is 10 times greater ($46.6 billion).

Kirwan wants the taxpayers to fund full-day preschool for all low-income 3- and 4-year-olds, higher academic standards, more training for teachers and higher teacher pay, hiring more teachers, expanding career and technical education programs and providing more resources to at-risk students.

The policy institute poll found that Marylanders are less likely to support expanding pre-K if it means reducing children’s health insurance funding (77%), reducing public safety funding (70%), cutting funding for roads and transportation (70%) or raising taxes such as income and property taxes (59%).

It said 62% of Marylanders believe Kirwan Commission recommendations would be valid only if there is more input from the business community, just one member of which served on the panel.

Thirty-eight percent of those surveyed said they would prefer higher teacher pay to an overall increase in education spending.

Christopher B. Summers, president and CEO of the policy institute, said the survey findings are just as relevant today as they were in 2018.

He said, “Maryland’s education bureaucracy, which grew by 60 percent from 1992 to 2015, should be reformed to work for students before taxpayers are told to hand over an additional $3.8 billion in new taxes annually.”

The poll indicated that 72% of Marylanders thought education resources should be used more efficiently, as opposed to simply raising the budget. 

That echoes precisely what we said here Wednesday, that not enough money is going to some areas where it is most needed, and too much is being wasted — particularly on the bureaucracies that our public school systems have created.

Gov. Larry Hogan has said that implementing Kirwan would create an $18 billion state budget deficit and lead to raising the personal income, sales and property taxes, resulting in an overall yearly increase in taxes of $6,200 for the average Maryland family.

Here are other findings from the 2018 policy institute poll, which can be found at https://www.mdpolicy.org/research/detail/key-findings-from-maryland-voter-survey-on-education:

• In light of school shootings nationwide, Maryland Democrats and Republicans agreed that school safety should be the top priority for new education spending.

• Marylanders don’t like the Kirwan Commission’s recommendation to restructure standardized tests to measure Maryland students against students in foreign countries (60% oppose, 31% favor). 

• Marylanders favor a “back to basics” approach to education that prioritizes career and technical training (67%) over character development or social services being offered at schools (27%).

• Marylanders (85%) do not believe politicians who say state gambling revenue will be dedicated solely to public education.

Only 763 people in a state that has a population of 3.94 million voting-age residents were surveyed in the Goucher College poll that indicated Marylanders support higher taxes to improve schools.

The Maryland Public Policy Institute poll surveyed 600 likely voters — an even smaller sample that the institute said accurately models previous turnouts in state elections by party registration, ethnicity, region, age, education and ethnicity.

As we also said Wednesday, opinion polls are merely an indication of what a small number of people think and — as the education spending surveys indicate — often disagree.

If such polls were reliable all of the time, Hillary Clinton would be president of the United States.