Delegate Trent Kittleman - District 9A |
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End of Session Letter
- What's wrong with Maryland Schools
- Has the Current legislature Addressed the Public School Monopoly and Inequities?
- What About Kirwin (the "Blueprint")?
- Why Should Maryland Support School Choice?
- WHAT CAN WE DO?
- WE MUST ACT NOW!
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What's Wrong with Maryland Schools? |
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Possibly the most important issue facing the Maryland General Assembly this year and every year is how to improve the pervasive problems with our state system of education. It seems that each year we fall further and further behind and drift further and further away from doing what works. This Letter will take an in-depth look at Maryland’s efforts to address the school system. |
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As Marylanders learned in the Kirwan Commission’s Preliminary Report, “when it comes to actual learning outcomes, Maryland’s public education system is a long way from performing at the level of the best in the world or even the best in the United States.”
The Public Education System of Maryland is plagued by two wrongs that prevent it from improving. The first is the public education monopoly and the dual efforts of the teachers’ unions and the legislature to keep it that way. The second is our inexplicable refusal to redress the glaring socioeconomic inequity that this system creates.
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Perhaps the clearest lesson to come out of this pandemic is that our children are prisoners of a monolithic public school system. And no matter how good your own child’s school may be, the pandemic has shown us that we have very little control over decisions made by an insular and unionized system of public education.
During the pandemic, families who were able to afford it pulled their children out of the virtual-only public school system and enrolled them in private schools, including private schools that offered online learning because these schools had the experience to do it right.
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Meanwhile, families without the means to afford private schools continued to sit and wait for the public schools to decide to return their children to school and their lives back to some semblance of normal.
Parents should have a choice about their children’s education. In Maryland, only the wealthy have that choice.
How is that fair? Where is the equity we strive so hard to achieve? Why aren’t my liberal friends beating the drum for school choice? For more access to Charter Schools? Unfortunately, as charter schools have become more successful, there has been a political backlash against charters, with anti-charter-school laws being passed across the country.
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The conjunction of an insular education bureaucracy, the rigidity of the teachers unions, and the political needs of the state legislature have protected that monopoly forever.
The answer to problems caused by this monopoly is to eliminate it by providing parents a choice.
Of all the perceived inequities continually requiring legislative redress, our inaction on this front is mindboggling. Our failure to give lower-income families access to educational choice and allow them the ability to get their children out of failing schools, is close to criminal.
Many years ago, my views on school choice were perfectly aligned with most of my very liberal friends; the reasons are obvious. I am at a loss to understand why their views have changed.
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Has the Current Legislature Addressed the Public-School Monopoly and Inequities? |
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Poorly, if at all.
This legislature has followed a strict policy of protecting the Public-School Monopoly even to the point of attempting to eliminate one of the only two alternative choices parents still have. Maryland has a modified school voucher program called BOOST. This program offers scholarships to students from low-income families to attend a state-approved school of their choice. The program serves around 3,000 students currently and has a long waiting list of students for whom there is no more money.
Every year, the legislature restricts the budget allocation for Boost, and the House Appropriations committee makes an effort to kill the program by limiting recipients either to students already attending or their siblings. Fortunately, the Senate always removes that language from the Budget Bill.
Maryland also has a Charter School law, passed in May of 2003 during the term of Governor Bob Ehrlich. Charter schools are tuition-free public schools that have extra freedom to innovate with curriculum and learning methods. Unfortunately, our law is rated as one of the worst in the nation, strictly limiting the flexibility of Charters to innovate, and preventing the best operators from coming into Maryland. One of the primary disincentives is the requirement that their teachers be state employees and, as such, members of a union. The limited number of Charter Schools has resulted in too few seats and too many applicants, creating huge waiting lists. None of which contributes to providing parents with school “choice.”
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But this legislature goes even further to protect public schools from “competition.” In 2017, we passed a bill deemed the “Protect our Schools Act.” And that’s exactly what it did; it protected the schools – not the students. Here’s how.
The bill acknowledges the obvious fact that some schools fail. The bill addresses this issue by requiring such schools to “develop additional strategies” for success. And, if such schools should continue to fail, the bill requires them to “develop appropriate intervention strategy.”
One would think that after three or more attempts, most of the available strategies would have been tried and if such schools continue to fail, what else might be tried. The legislature addresses that problem, too – by listing all the innovative approaches that may NOT be tried, including, converting to a charter school (this restriction was, fortunately, removed by the senate), issue direct vouchers, tax credit programs, education savings accounts, create a state-run school district, contract with a for-profit company, create a new school system outside the 24 jurisdictions or create any new public school without the approval of the local school board.
In other words, children may be sentenced to attend failing schools forever, or until repeating the same mistakes of the past suddenly works!
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Parent-Empowerment & School Choice Bills Rejected by the Supermajority
Below are just a few of the bills Republicans introduced in support of parents and students. All were killed in committee.
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What about Kirwan?
(the "Blueprint")
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Maryland legislators have tried to improve our schools. In 2016, they convened the Kirwan Commission to study experts and best practices and come up with a plan to improve. Three years later, after intensive study of best practices in the world’s best school systems -- Finland, Singapore, Shanghai and Ontario, the Commission issued an impressive report and a series of extensive and interlocked recommendations to be implemented over a 10-year period and cost $32 Billion over that period of time.
Nonetheless, despite the Commission’s extensive research, thorough documentation, and expert advice, the “fix” was no more than the same failed policies from prior years, albeit dressed in much fancier and more expensive attire.
Those concerns were expressed most succinctly in the liberal-leaning Washington Post, which was not impressed. In an editorial titled, Washington Post: Maryland can't spend its way to better schooling, published shortly after the commission’s final report was issued, the newspaper said, "There seems to have been a headlong rush to embrace the commission's recommendations, with most state politicians swearing fealty to them in last year's elections. That should give serious pause to Maryland taxpayers."
It further noted, “while there certainly are praiseworthy aspects to the Commission findings – it is disappointing there was no nod to providing choice to students trapped in failing schools.”
The editorial ended with the following: "The state's previous experience [with Thornton] also demonstrated the shortcomings, if not outright failure, of increased education expenditures to produce better outcomes. . . . they say this time it will be different because there would be a new state bureaucracy that will ensure accountability. Color us skeptical."
One member of the Kirwan Commission expressed serious concerns in his Individual Statement, where he suggested, “Children and parents should be especially troubled—as I am—by the Commission’s refusal to endorse or recommend any form of school choice, whether within and between districts, to charter schools, or to private and alternative schools.”
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Why Should Maryland Support
School Choice?
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Charter Schools: Just How Good Are They? Depending on whom you listen to, charter schools are either a striking success or a "failed and damaging experiment.”
Somewhere along the way, our public educators have taken a wrong turn. Instead of encouraging ideas and innovations that have proven successful in teaching children, they have viewed charter schools as competition.
A Milwaukee school board member described public support for charter schools as: “like asking the Coca-Cola Company to turn its facilities to Pepsi so Pepsi can expand and compete with the Coca-Cola Company.”
What the public school system and its vocal advocates fail to acknowledge is that "the taxpayers bought and paid for the school buildings for the purpose of educating children -- not for the purpose of protecting incumbents in the education establishment from competition."
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The only real question we should ask is, do charter schools, by and large, offer and provide a successful education to children who have been mired in failing schools for years.
That answer is a categorical YES! Not only does the presence of charter schools improve educational outcomes for their own students, studies have shown that students in traditional public schools in the area also benefit.
Opponents raise all sorts of red herrings in their efforts to discredit charter schools, but few of their arguments are true.
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The reason Dr. Sowell’s book is in a class by itself is because of the incredibly precise comparisons of students in charter classrooms with students in traditional classrooms. That is because, in New York City, many Charter schools operate in the same school building as the traditional public school for that area. Charter students are chosen by lottery from among students who are assigned to that school district and have the same characteristics as the students remaining in the traditional classrooms.
Under these unique circumstances, Dr. Sowell was able to compare individual grades and classrooms of students with a reasonable degree of certainty that the results are almost entirely due to the value or inadequacies of the teaching methods and innovations allowed in the charter classrooms.
The results were astounding! The table shown here is chosen at random from the over 40 tables in the book. It compares the performance of the charter school students with the students in the traditional public schools New York State tests in English Language Arts and Mathematics. In almost every comparison, in every table, the Charter School students outperform their traditional public school counterparts – regardless of the grade (or subject)—often by a significant amount.
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An important take-away from this study is the importance of the charter school vender. As Dr. Sowell notes in the preface of the book, “Not all charter schools turned out to be successful . . . But particular charter schools, and especially some particular networks of charter schools, located in low-income black and Hispanic neighborhoods, achieved educational results not only far above the levels achieved by most public schools in those neighborhoods, but sometimes even higher educational results than those in most schools located in affluent white neighborhoods.” The Network schools chosen by Dr. Sowell were ones that had classes in at least five different schools within the city. These turned out to be Kipp Charter Schools, Success Academy, Explore Schools Charter Network, Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First. |
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There are a surprisingly wide variety of school choice options. Here is a list of just some of the innovative and exciting options in education that have proven successful in some manner:
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Education Savings Accounts
Tax-Credit Education Savings Accounts
Individual Tax Credits & Deductions
Tax-Credit Scholarships
School Vouchers
Charter Schools
Magnet Schools
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Homeschooling
Hybrid Homeschooling
Online Learning
Microschooling
Town Tuitioning
Personalized Learning & Learning Pods
Inter/intra-District Public School Choice
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EMPOWER PARENTS - EMBRACE SCHOOL CHOICE
More specifically, we must:
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Rewrite our Charter School Law to encourage instead of discourage the good Charter School networks from coming to Maryland;
- Increase funding for our education voucher program, BOOST, from $10 million to $100 million;
- Pass legislation to provide for Education Savings Accounts;
- Implement other alternatives prove successful elsewhere
In other words, empower parents with the ability to choose the proper forum for their child’s education—regardless of their ability to pay
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When you VOTE this NOVEMBER,
ELECT LEADERS WHO SUPPORT SCHOOL CHOICE!
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Authorized, Friends of Trent Kittleman, William Oliver, Treasurer |
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