A charter-school bill will be introduced in the Maryland General Assembly this year. That is the good news. What sort of charter-school bill? Well, that may be the bad news. In 1991, Minnesota became the first state to enact a charter-school law. Despite current intentions, Maryland is by now well behind the curve, being one […]
Marjorie lives in Montgomery County, having moved there a number of years ago in part because the reputation of the county’s school system. Marjorie’s daughter, Emily, is what is known as a “GT/LD” student in bureaucratese. That is to say that she is a gifted and talented student, but also learning disabled. The public schools […]
Last fall, Montgomery County activist Sylvia Fubini established a committee within the Montgomery County Council of PTAs to examine serious school-reform ideas – school choice, charter schools and so forth. In other words, she proposed the sort of debate the educracy generally goes to almost any lengths to avoid. Ms. Fubini’s plan got off to […]
Education is particularly relevant at the moment, given Governor Glendening’s plans to shore up support by “spending his way to November,” as the Baltimore Sun puts it. Much of this largess will be focused on the public schools. The high stakes involved in education are also apparent in the gutting and/or dilution of the two […]
Prudent families only borrow when they must. They know that the results of over borrowing can be dire. No such worries appear to exist in Maryland with respect to incurring debt. The state constitution requires the state to pay its bills on time and in full. An apparently unlimited supply of tax dollars ensures the […]
A “State Child Health Insurance Program,” called the S-CHIP, was included in the 1997 federal budget. This assistance program provides states with federal funds to extend coverage and services to uninsured, low-income children. It appropriates specific sums for each of fiscal years 1998 through 2007, which the states can obtain through a matching process similar […]
Serious school reform is no longer a train that can be stopped. The groundswell of public opinion is on the side of reformers. Certainly, there are bureaucratic and special-interest obstacles to be cleared. But the people have spoken. They want more say over the education of their youngsters. A bill currently before the Maryland General […]
Analysis of Census Bureau and other statistical data from this decade reveals that Maryland’s public schools are relatively under utilized, at least in comparison to many other states. as shown in the table, in 1994, only 15 states saw a smaller proportion of school-aged children enrolled in the public schools. That year 89.5 percent of […]
A casual approach to the cost and size of government has been a tradition in Maryland. State and local personal income taxation is among the very highest per capita in the country, a fact that has elicited remarkably little interest among the intelligentsia. This is despite a recently published warning by the Glendening administration’s own secretary of business and economic development, James Brady, that such confiscatory fiscal policy serves as a “red flag” to businesses.
Last year, Frederick F. Siegel, a history professor at New York’s Cooper Union for the Arts and Sciences, released a somewhat pessimistic book on the fate of America’s cities, The Future Once Happened Here.1 During one of his recent visits to Maryland, the Calvert Institute conducted a lengthy interview with Siegel. In particular, the institute […]