Abstract
Outside Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Baltimore on the morning of April 18, teenagers milled about with a sense of outrage. Around seventy-five students left their classes to walk out of school in protest—not over gun violence and not in sympathy with striking teachers. The teens called local television stations, 1 went outside, and held up handmade signs on notebook paper: “Please Let Our Teachers Stay.” Unlike some other school walkouts across the United States in recent months, no teachers or administrators had sanctioned this protest. What made it unique was that the students alone organized it, on social media, in response to the news from three of their favorite teachers that they had been “surplused” out of the school budget for next year.
The Baltimore Teachers Union . . . has been silent on [surplusing] and other practices that erode the quality of students’ education.
In Baltimore’s chronically underfunded public school system, 2 the teachers’ union takes care of its own but has largely turned its back on the fight for adequate resources for students. Budget cuts and shrinking enrollment often mean that teaching positions get written out of the budget—“surplused”—at one school, and the person occupying that position is either rehired elsewhere or furloughed and eventually laid off. The Baltimore Teachers Union (BTU) has been silent on this and other practices that erode the quality of students’ education.
Indeed, the climate that permeates all but the most affluent public schools here is one of scarcity—and a systemic indifference to that scarcity. What Dunbar High School students did was to demand a human response to the problem of veteran, beloved teachers being cast aside thanks to a funding system that puts the needs of students dead last. Ahead of their needs come the interests of city politicians, state politicians, philanthropists, nonprofit organizations, unelected school board officials, teachers’ union leaders, lawyers, and city contractors. Baltimore City Public Schools’ chronic lack of resources reflects a set of choices that policymakers made, despite their professed love of education, year after year. But, like those Dunbar students, a constellation of teachers, parents, and community activists is prepared to fight to reverse the trend of scarcity. Their first task is to get the powers that be to wake up and do something.
State Inertia
In 2017, Baltimore Public Schools CEO Sonja Santelises declared a state of budgetary emergency: because the state and city together had not been meeting their joint obligation to adequately fund the Baltimore City Schools for nearly ten years, mass layoffs were about to happen. School principals would be forced to make impossible choices between safely staffing playgrounds at recess and teaching music or science. Her declaration touched off a firestorm of protest that brought hundreds of parents, community groups, and some teachers on rented school buses to Annapolis to demand that state lawmakers cooperate with Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh to find the money to stop the layoffs. Some layoffs did happen, but lawmakers and the mayor found $130 million to stave off additional layoffs for another three years.
Attorney and director of the ACLU Maryland’s Education Project Bebe Verdery credits the temporary win to grassroots parent organizing and Santelises’ strategic thinking. Verdery said, “Former superintendents might have moved some money around and cut this and that and maybe nobody in Annapolis will aim at you. Dr. Santelises really helped a lot by giving a high figure: $130 million, which was a shocker and which can be translated into like a thousand teachers. When people know that, they care and they will turn up.”
Why the historic budget gap? Because the ACLU sued and won a consent decree in 1996 3 to force the state to fund public education more equitably throughout the state; Maryland now uses a formula to determine how much it must put into each of its twenty-four school districts—twenty-three counties and the city of Baltimore. The formula calls for each district to get an amount calibrated to the amount of taxable wealth (including property and income) in that district; then, the district must put in the remainder (labeled “maintenance of effort”) up to a certain amount per pupil. Baltimore relies heavily on this state funding. 4 It is normal for the state to put in about 70 percent of the city schools’ budget, and the city puts in 23 percent or so, with the federal government picking up the difference.
This worked for the city until the Great Recession hit in 2008, shrinking the overall tax base that the state had to work with. State lawmakers, looking to protect their own home districts, complained that Baltimore’s per-pupil spending was too high and that it was asking too much from them. Lawmakers changed the formula, says Verdery, to take out the inflation factor, spelling an end to automatic increases based on inflation. “All the things that go up in ten years and you give people the exact same amount of money. Why would they not be in a deficit? That’s the responsibility the state really tried to sidestep.” And then, post-recession, there was more bad news for Baltimore’s kids: Maryland’s governorship shifted.
The governor wields near-total budget authority in Maryland. Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican and former businessman whose political campaign was funded directly by the Koch brothers, is a pugnacious critic of public education, supports vouchers, and likes to single out Baltimore City’s schools. In March 2017, as parents were digesting the fact that their kids might be losing their art teachers, Hogan went on the radio and called Baltimore’s school system an “absolute disaster,” saying it had “no fiscal accountability.” 5 This enraged families in the 63 percent African-American city. Hogan’s comments were insulting, but activists say he was not entirely wrong about the city’s lack of fiscal accountability.
City Inaction
The state of Maryland and the city of Baltimore are jointly responsible for funding the city’s schools. But, says Baltimore City Schools parent and activist Melissa Schober, the city could be doing much more. She continues, “There’s a lot of entrenched leadership. Baltimore is a machine town. A lot of people become mayor because it is sort of their time, as opposed to really deserving it.” Mayor Pugh has not stepped up to fund schools. “When Pugh ran,” Schober points out, “she filled out a written questionnaire (from the American Federation of Teachers) that said that in excess of 30 percent of the city budget would go to education by the end of her term. That’s just not true. She hasn’t done it.” Kim Trueheart, an activist and community leader who founded the Liberty Village, a recreation center that provides wraparound services and additional academic support to a public elementary school, also expressed disappointment in Pugh’s commitment. “It may be in her heart, it may be in her mind, it may be on paper. But as it rolls out here, sixteen months after she was sworn in, it’s not as visible as it could be.”
Like Governor Hogan, the mayor exercises extreme power over the city budget. When the mayor submits her budget to the City Council, the Council members have the power only to make cuts, not to add. But some argue that even City Council members are shirking their duty to educate Baltimore’s kids: while they could vote “no” on her budget, or cut other city programs to fund schools, they rarely do so. Last year, by the end of the budgeting process, all of City Hall cried poor. “We are a poor city,” Schober allows. “We’re also a city of enormous wealth.” Schober points to the city’s use of tax increment financing (TIF), a tax incentive scheme that thus far has exclusively been used to lure big corporations such as Under Armour to Baltimore. Such handouts to corporations might have had even worse impact on schools if activists and parents and students had not protested.
The city does give one public agency the money it demands. In her proposed budget for 2019, the mayor put in $510 million for the police department.6,7 The Baltimore Police Department is currently in the grip of a corruption scandal that reaches deep into its ranks. No matter, the mayor has proposed funding it at twice the amount ($278.4 million) she wants to allocate to the schools operating a system serving eighty thousand students.
. . . [T]he mayor has proposed funding [the police department] at twice the amount ($278.4 million) she wants to allocate to the schools . . .
Trueheart explains that the city is not likely to alter its budget to put more toward education, because it is not required to do so by the state or anyone else. “The city doesn’t prioritize education because it is not part of its core budgeting. The city only budgets for the state-mandated maintenance of effort. And so what the city prioritizes is every other municipal service but education.”
Baltimore City does have a school board—whose members are appointed by the mayor. Schober points to a lack of accountability there as well, and comments, “There are all those individuals, none of whom are publicly elected or accountable or have hearings where you can ask them questions. So advocates find it very difficult, and for good reason, to make positive change.”
Where Are the Teachers?
The Baltimore Teachers’ Union has mostly been quiet on the budget. It did bring teachers to Annapolis in April 2017 for the protests, but it was not one of the lead groups there; nonprofit groups such as the Baltimore Education Coalition, the ACLU, and the Downtown Baltimore Family Alliance did most of the organizing for that event. The BTU has long stuck to bread-and-butter contract and member-servicing activities, organizing members to prepare for contract bargaining and mobilizing for the occasional harbor cruise or bus trip to the Preakness horse race. But when icy weather caused pipes to burst and boilers to fail in a large number of schools in winter 2016, some teachers took to social media with photos of kids wearing heavy coats and gloves and huddled at desks and cafeteria tables in freezing schools. Although longtime union president Marietta English did not at first seize on this opportunity to position the union as a defender of students’ safety, a number of teachers who had been organizing for months outside the official union structure did speak up, and made national news. 8 Eventually, the union had to issue a statement demanding that the schools close until the boilers could be fixed. 9
Corey Gaber, a sixth-grade teacher in his seventh year of teaching in Baltimore public schools, said, The reason that story blew up is because of a year’s worth of organizing. Because this is not the first year that our schools’ facilities are broken down and kids are wearing coats. There’s literally nothing new about that. But in the past, teachers didn’t have relationships with each other, there wasn’t a safe space to say, “Hey, this is going on in my school. Is your school open in these conditions?”
Gaber and a few others have organized into a formal caucus, called Baltimore Movement of Rank and File Educators (BMORE), made up of teachers who want a more transparent, democratic union that will fight for students and organize. And they are not alone: A few months after the freezing schools scandal, teacher Kimberly Mooney and her Caucus of Educators for Democracy and Equity (CEDE), which works in coalition with BMORE, came close to beating English in the union election.
Gaber says the BMORE caucus has developed slowly and deliberately, trying to emulate the way the Chicago Teachers’ Union CORE caucus built a structure based on organizing among parents and community groups. Gaber agrees that Baltimore’s students deserve a union that will fight for their right to a positive learning environment and adequate resources. But, he adds, the BTU has a long way to go before members would consider striking for those things. “Our union has been very successful in protecting our pay and benefits,” he said. Salaries for standard teachers in the BTU’s contract range from about $48,500 to about $82,000 per year. “So you can live off our salary. And we have great benefits.” To get these things, the union bargained away its right to strike. “And if we strike, the entire union can be decertified and no longer be the representative in collective bargaining. So it could possibly be starting from scratch.” When asked if the recent wave of teachers’ strikes was inspiring his members, he said, “There are many in our group saying ‘Yes, we should also be striking.’ There are others who say, ‘Do you want to risk having the entire BTU be destroyed for that strike, and what exactly are we striking for?’” “. . . if we strike, the entire union can be decertified and no longer be the representative in collective bargaining.”
The Dunbar students might argue that a teachers’ strike could prevent more veteran teachers being surplused away from the students who desperately need them. But for now, until the BTU changes leadership, and pro-democratic voices such as BMORE or CEDE can take over, those individual sacrifices may just be part of the cost of doing business with the schools’ CEO, the mayor, and the state.
That leaves parents, kids, and community activists to insist on accountability for city schools. Student-centered groups such as the Baltimore Algebra Project 10 attend school board and city council hearings, demanding education justice including more equitable budgets and disciplinary practices. Trueheart has aligned herself with a community-based nonprofit called the Teachers Democracy Project, 11 which trains parents and teachers to become activists and raise issues about school administration. Both Trueheart and Schober are regular gadflies at school board and city council hearings, raising questions and calling out the lack of political will to fund public education. Trueheart views Baltimore’s hyper-segregated schools as a harmful remnant of its redlining and other racially discriminatory practices. “We have wasted years of children’s lives with stupidity,” Trueheart told me. “We have relegated city dwellers to a poor education, no job training, no job opportunities. Sometimes I think that was intentional.”
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.