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 […]
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 […]
For the vast majority of men, the basic pattern of life has not changed in 3,000 years. As young boys, males play, go to school; later, they get jobs, get married, raise families. Life is now more competitive than it used to be, and the rhythm of life accelerated as students learn computer science and […]
Maryland has no legislation authorizing charter schools, nothwithstanding the fact that the charter-school movement is one whose time has undoubtedly come. Regardless of Maryland’s tardiness, there are currently 787 charter schools serving students in 23 states and the District of Columbia.1 One inhibiting factor is that the powerful Maryland State Teachers’ Association is, at best, […]
Last July, the Calvert Institute published a Calvert Issue Brief by Baltimore attorney George Liebmann. Called “The Agreement: How Federal, State and Union Regulations Are Destroying Public Education in Maryland,”1 the study included the first analysis of all 24 teachers’ union contracts currently operative in this state. A summary of the report is reproduced below. […]
Though conservatives have long been aware of it, many of Maryland’s opinion leaders seem blissfully unconcerned about the state’s traditionally casual approach to the cost and size of government. State and local combined personal income taxation is among the very highest in the country, a fact that has elicited remarkably little interest among the intelligentsia. […]
The institute’s Focus on the Facts No. 2 described Marylanders’ relatively low utilization of public schools, compared to other states. And can you blame them? Regardless of all the educrat back-patting following the release last December of the most recent scores on the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program (MSPAP) test, two recent, independent studies of […]