Hogan’s education record
The governor is right to claim that he spent a record amount on pre-K-12 education during his term, but there are many different ways to look at the question
Our view:
Gov. Larry Hogan’s re-election campaign is on the air with a multimillion-dollar ad buy hammering home the message that he’s committed to public education. All three of the commercials feature the claim that he’s spent a record amount on pre-K-12 education, about $25 billion during his four years in office, and that’s absolutely true. To be precise, Maryland has spent $25,407,073,000 on public schools, which represents record spending in each of his four years in office.
That’s impressive. What would be more impressive is finding a Maryland governor who couldn’t claim to have spent a record amount on education in each of his years in office. We were able to document year-over-year increases annually since at least fiscal 1996, which is not surprising given that state spending on schools is driven in large part by enrollment, which has consistently trended upward.
The Thornton effect
The big change that occurred during that time was the adoption in 2002 of new education spending formulas as a consequence of a commission’s recommendations on what the state needed to do to meet its constitutional mandate to provide an adequate public education. The so-called Thornton formulas were phased in over a number of years, starting during former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.’s term. That led to eye-popping, year-over-year percentage increases in how much Maryland spent on its public schools, and if that’s your metric for which governor gets the prize for record education spending, Mr. Ehrlich is the clear winner. Spending on schools went up a cumulative 44 percent during his term.
Gov. Martin O’Malley caught the end of the Thornton phase-in during his first year in office, and consequently he can boast of the largest single-year increase in education spending (15 percent in fiscal 2008) and a cumulative 28 percent increase during his first term. Mr. Hogan’s four-year record is pedestrian by comparison (7.8 percent) though better than Mr. O’Malley’s second term (6.3 percent). Gov. Larry Hogan welcomes students on the first day of school at Waugh Chapel Elementary School in Odenton. construction spending overall, Mr. Hogan again comes out on top, beating the mark set during Mr. O’Malley’s second term by about $100 million. That’s more significant than his record operating spending, in some ways, because there’s much more variance in how much the state spends in any given year. Before Mr. Hogan authorized a record $427 million this year, the previous high mark of $388 million was back in 2008.
Mr. Hogan also sets the mark when it comes to the amount of school construction spending as a percentage of available funds (mainly general obligation bond proceeds but also some other funds). He hasn’t topped the 44 percent of available capital dollars Mr. O’Malley used in fiscal 2008, but his four-year average of 31 percent is the best of any gubernatorial term dating back to Mr. Ehrlich.
Kirwan on the horizon