The headlines were glorious.
“Maryland Governor Announces Schools Will Open After Labor Day,” declared the local CBS affiliate. “Port City Brewing Co. will stay, expand in Alexandria,” the Washington Business Journal trumpeted.
More summer! More beer! Cheers!
But just beneath the headline the stories took a more bitter turn.
Port City Brewery was only staying because of a huge pile of corporate welfare. Maryland’s extension of summer was a one-size-fits-all executive order by the governor, over the sensible objections of local school officials.
This is one depressing aspect of being a conservative: Sometimes you end up opposing things that you like because you value more the proper manner of doing things. Is more summer worth trampling on local control? Is more beer worth the corporate welfare?
Here’s the background:
In Maryland in the 1990s school generally started in September. That start date creeped earlier over the years, for a handful of reasons. Snow days became more common, and crimped the school calendar. Standardized tests — in May rather than June — increasingly became the target date for teachers.
Each county got to determine its own start date, in keeping with Maryland’s general deference to local control on all sorts of issues, including liquor stores and tax rates.
A few years back, State Comptroller Peter Franchot launched a campaign to push the first day of school back to after Labor Day. Labor Day is the end of the summer by many standards, and a post-Labor Day school start is the norm in the Northeast.
On Wednesday, Aug. 31 — the third day of school — Gov. Larry Hogan stood on the boardwalk in Ocean City and announced his new executive order: Next school year, all state public schools would open after Labor Day.
Preserving all of August as summer vacation is a good thing, and Marylanders overwhelmingly support it: The idea carried the state 72 percent to 19 percent in a poll last year.
Teachers unions blocked Labor Day legislation in the state capitol for years, though. They want more time to teach to the standardized tests that come in May.
Special interests thwarted a good idea supported by an overwhelming majority. Hogan steamrolled the special interests, and instituted the good policy.
Here’s the splash of cold water: Education decisions are properly made on as local a level as possible. Yes, Ocean City benefits from high school kids being able to work summer jobs through Labor Day — which is why Worcester County already moved its start date to after Labor Day.
Meanwhile, in Baltimore there are many more poor students who are more dependent on school lunches and who don’t get to summer on the Eastern Shore. While plenty of Bethesda parents provide “enrichment” for their kids over the summer — sleep-away camp, piano lessons, hours of reading in the hammock — that’s not as common in rural parts of the state, and students slip more academically over the course of the summer.
Extending summer vacation is generally a good thing, but local control of schools is more important. And if a one-size-fits-all rule is to come down, it should reflect a broader consensus — the kind of consensus one builds in passing a bill through the legislature.
The Port City Brewery story has a similar moral. Port City announced a $3 million expansion in Northern Virginia. Port City makes good beer. So Port City’s expansion is good, but what government did to keep it here is bad.
The state’s Department of Agriculture is giving the company $250,000 of taxpayer money. The City of Alexandria will match that grant. These aren’t loans. This is just a gift — to a profitable corporation that happened to be run by a donor to Democratic politicians.
Morally, it’s wrong to transfer money from taxpayers to profitable companies. Some Muslims and evangelicals might be particularly disturbed to find their tax dollars supporting a brewery.
Subsidizing Port City’s expansion takes precious Alexandria commercial real estate off the market, thus preventing some other business from forming. Port City was considering a move to Fairfax County, and so that county’s taxpayers are paying to lose a potential business.
Conservatism is as much a disposition as an ideology. It rejects the idea that ends justify means. It preaches that rules should stand even when they seem to stand in the way of good things, like summer and beer.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
