Baltimore City pre-K instructor, Berol Dewdney, the 2022-2023 Maryland teacher of the year, uses an interactive video with hand signals to guide her classroom at the beginning of the school day. (Photo by Shannon Clark/Capital News Service)
Maryland’s track record with public education is not good, especially for those facing the barriers of race, language, low income and disability. We persistently undercut our constitutional and rhetorical commitment to public education by putting it on the budgetary chopping block.
We face this choice again in the current legislative session. Do we try to cut our way to a balanced budget and, again, shortchange our kids or do we meet our responsibilities by raising revenue and more of it in a fairer and more productive way.
Prior to 1954, Maryland schools discriminated explicitly against students based on the color of the student’s skin. The Brown decision, declaring that segregation is unconstitutional, was rendered in 1954. Twelve years later (1966), an investigatory report to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights made it clear that Maryland schools remained largely segregated and, thus, discriminatory.
We have replaced segregation with inadequate opportunity and funding.
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In 1979, when I was Maryland’s State Superintendent of Schools, Baltimore City and Caroline, Somerset and St. Mary’s counties sued the state (Somerset v. Hornbeck) asserting that the state was not providing Maryland students a “thorough and efficient system of free public schools” guaranteed by our constitution. As state superintendent of schools and the lead defendant by virtue of office, I spent many hours on the witness stand as a chief witness for the plaintiffs.
In effect, I pled guilty. No equitable or even reasonable appraisal of the disparity of funding and opportunity could reach a different conclusion in my view. The trial court agreed with the plaintiffs. The state appealed. The trial court’s decision on behalf of Maryland’s students, was overturned. Inequity prevailed. The state’s most vulnerable children were, again, left behind.
Another 10 years passed. In the mid-90s, the Bradford case was filed on the premise of constitutionally inadequate and racially discriminatory opportunities and funding. Seven years later, the Thornton Commission offered recommendations designed to rectify the structurally racist discrimination that has been built into the Maryland system since the first publicly supported school, King William’s School, was established in the colony in Annapolis in 1696.
In response to Thornton, the General Assembly passed the Bridge to Excellence in Public Education Act of 2002. It appeared progress was on the horizon … but only for six years. In 2008, the state said it could not maintain the commitment to its children because of the recession. Again, the absence of political will placed the burden of the state’s finances on its children. Funding for the Bridge to Excellence was cut.
Another 12 years passed … 66 years after Brown, 44 years after Somerset. Based on visionary recommendations of the Kirwan Commission, the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future became law in 2020, arguably the most systemic, well-funded and comprehensive state education legislation in the nation’s history.
And now? Another fiscal crisis. The promise may have lasted only four years this time.
We are being told that justice for Maryland’s students may be denied again, the state budget may require our kids — especially the most vulnerable ones — to wait a little longer. Are we serious? Many of the Blueprint’s kids are actually grandchildren, even the great grandchildren, of those to whom the promise of a different future was made in Brown.
There are other solutions than to cut our children’s opportunities. The fairer revenue-raising proposals contained in the Fair Share for Maryland Act, sponsored by Sen. Shelly Hettleman (D-Baltimore County) and Del. Julie Palakovich Carr (D-Montgomery), will address nearly two-thirds of the projected deficit. That’s a great start. It may need to go further. Let’s finally meet our moral and constitutional obligations to our kids. How can we call our state’s budget a moral document and do less?