Here’s the billion-dollar question for Maryland educators: How can you justify spending another $1.3 billion during a budget crisis when the $3.5 billion you’ve already spent under the 2002 Thornton Act has yielded such disappointing results? A comprehensive statistical analysis of Maryland public school performance data conducted for The Examiner Newspapers by the Heritage Foundation’s respected Center for Data Analysis found that academic gains for minority and disadvantaged students have not kept up with higher per-pupil expenditures since 2002. Closing this persistent gap was supposed to be a primary goal of Thornton funding.
For example, 2007 scores data for limited-English students in both Montgomery and Prince George’s County show a steady decline even as per-pupil expenditures continue to rise. Low-income and underperforming students also showed little gains between third and fifth grade — even after five years of Thornton funding. Since 2003, Prince George’s County’s per-student expenditures increased from $7,701 in 2003 to $9,103 in 2007, but, despite the cash infusion, only 35 percent of African-American eighth graders in the country’s wealthiest minority-majority county are proficient in math and just 52.1 percent read at grade level. In Montgomery, black achievement scores for eighth graders were higher, but still significantly trailed the countywide average: 43 v. 86 percent in math; 61 v. 86 percent in reading. More to the point, the black achievement gap has remained remarkably consistent since 2003 — the first year of Thornton funding.
