Research » Education »

Will Maryland Care Enough About Education to Do More Than Throw Money?

Originially Published in the Daily Record

By Christopher B. Summers
Published on Friday, March 05, 2004
OP-EDS

The Baltimore City Public School System’s $75 million (and growing) deficit should be a wake-up call to lawmakers in Annapolis.  Gov. Ehrlich now has the extraordinary opportunity to bring long overdue education reform to a system that desperately needs more than just a quick-fix infusion of taxpayer money.

The schools’ financial crisis did not happen overnight; instead it’s the culmination of years of ignoring warning signs by ineffective management that disdains meaningful structural reforms.  It is the same scenario that we’ve witnessed in other cities like Washington, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Oakland.
 
In Baltimore, a $50 million taxpayer bailout may alleviate the financial shortfall and keep the system out of bankruptcy for now, but it will not solve the mounting problems that continue to plague the system’s underpinnings.  When politicians are faced with a severe, systemic, chronic problem in public education, they usually shy away from enacting politically difficult but meaningful reforms that could correct it.
 
Instead, while mouthing the creed “for the children,” they throw money at the problem and hope it somehow fixes the mess. Perhaps this time, Baltimore and Maryland’s elected leaders will engage in good education policymaking that truly would benefit Baltimore’s long-underserved school children.

Let me be clear here: The problems that plague the city public school system is poor policy and the lack of political will to improve that policy, not a lack of taxpayer support.

Meltdown

The current financial meltdown is not from a lack of funding, it is the result of years of questionable spending and financial mismanagement.  If this crisis were happening in the private sector where corporations must adequately serve their customers or else go bankrupt, poor managers would be fired, under-performing employees would be laid off, resources would be redirected toward more efficient and higher-valued uses and whole divisions radically restructured in order to begin providing goods and services of value to customers.
 
But when public schools are failing to serve their children and the taxpayers, politicians shy away from serious reform and instead maintain the status quo under a patina of “improvement” and a pile of more tax dollars.  Consider the results of a 2002 independent study conducted by the Abell Foundation (which recently agreed to chip in $8 million to the schools bailout) and focused just on Special Education within the city schools.  The report noted that the Special Education program does not have a unified budget, does not isolate or analyze compliance expenditures, and focuses on excessive paperwork and other bureaucratic procedures that are unnecessary and do very little to improve instruction.

The cost of those procedures was conservatively estimated at $14 million each year — money that would close a significant portion of the current deficit. But, instead of reforming that segment of the system, policymakers have carefully maintained the status quo.  The underlying problem in Baltimore City Schools is the simplistic belief that the only way to improve educational outcomes is to appropriate more money.

Throwing good money away

Mayor O’Malley’s recent campaign promotional materials boasted, “Baltimore’s per pupil spending increased by 15 percent [since 1999] … improving from 6th to 2nd highest in the state.”

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, per-pupil expenditure for Baltimore City in 1999-2000 was $7,846, with Maryland as a whole spending $7,731 per pupil.  In all the bravado from O’Malley and Maryland school officials about how much they “invest” in education, there’s not one precious word about how wisely they manage that investment.

It’s time to realize that a heavily funded but poorly managed school system is little better than a poorly funded, poorly managed one.  In January 2003, O’Malley and Baltimore school board chair Patricia Welch requested an independent study of the school system by the Greater Baltimore Committee, after they and state lawmakers were made aware of an unexpected $31 million deficit for the 2002-2003 budget.

Conducted by business executives and public school system fiscal experts, the report’s two key findings were “a structural deficit built into the financial management system that has never been addressed and lack of accountability and any kind of systematic adherence to the budget process.”

The report went on to say that “management does not adhere to the budget calendar and there are no penalties for overspending and no incentive to keep spending within the budgeted amount.”

How much longer do almost 90,000 city public school students — many of whom are from low socio-economic status and especially need a good education — have to go on being under-served?

Gov. Ehrlich has the opportunity to right years of ill-prescribed solutions and policies to a system that has been plagued with the same problems for far too long, operated by complacent educrats, and subsidized by lawmakers beholden to status-quo failed education policies of past.

— Christopher B. Summers is president of the Maryland Public Policy Institute.