OPINION:
“The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”
So supposedly said Benjamin Franklin, or John Ruskin, or someone else. Whoever said it, here it is put another way: Free or low-cost stuff is generally garbage, and you’re going to regret choosing it.
That’s increasingly the case with America’s public schools, to which we are all entitled to send our children “free of charge.” Of course, these schools aren’t really free, at least not for those of us who pay taxes.
In fact, although leftists love to moan that public education suffers from chronic underfunding, spending on public schools has shot up in recent years, with academic outcomes inversely proportionate to that outlay.
As Chris Papst wrote in these pages Tuesday, in the past three years, in Maryland, a state with one of the highest effective tax burdens in the country, funding for public schools has risen 16%. That translates to billions of taxpayer dollars funneled into the schools.
What does the Free State have to show for it? Last year, its four-year high school graduation rate fell to under 87%, the lowest level in three years, and the statewide high school dropout rate rose to nearly 10%, the highest level in more than a decade.
It would be one thing if poorer academics were the only problem with public schools, but they’re not. In the Washington area and elsewhere, violent student behavior against other students and teachers is increasingly tolerated, even swept under the rug by administrations.
One longtime Montgomery County, Maryland, public elementary school teacher, who spoke to The Washington Times anonymously for fear of being fired, was physically assaulted by a student for several minutes earlier this academic year. No one intervened.
The student, who kicked and punched the teacher, was not expelled or even suspended. Instead, the school administration repeatedly attempted to get the teacher to sit down for a meeting with the child.
Montgomery County, by the way, is one of the nation’s most expensive counties to live in, and its public schools are supposed to be some of the best.
Try telling that to some of the parents of students at Thomas S. Wootton High School, the county’s second-highest-ranked secondary school, where last month, one student shot another. The 16-year-old suspect, reportedly a recent transfer to Wootton who had been moved for “discipline issues,” was said to be wearing an ankle monitor at the time.
In February 2025, in the same county at the even better-ranked Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, a group of students beat another student in a bathroom, a fact brought to light only after a video of the incident was posted online.
No wonder teachers and students are leaving public schools in droves. Children aren’t only not learning anything, but they (and their educators) also risk being physically harmed by vicious classmates simply by attending.
In a multiyear National Institute of Justice survey, released in 2024, of thousands of U.S. teachers, just 17% said they had not been victimized by their students.
That means 83% of teachers reported being verbally, physically or psychologically abused by their students. That’s horrifying.
All the while, in true leftist fashion, more hard-earned taxpayer cash is being thrown at the problem. Where is that money going? We have no idea because taxpayers don’t get itemized receipts for the ever-rising portion of our salaries we’re forced to fork over to the bloated bureaucracy (though heaven help you if you’re a small-business owner who is off by half a foot on your home office measurement on your tax return).
In Maryland, here are just some of the categories into which taxpayer dollars spent on education fall: “Concentration of Poverty Aid,” “Compensatory Education Aid” and “Comparable Wage Index Aid.”
Whatever any of that means, it’s evidently not making students smarter, more informed or better protected from violent peers. Nor is it causing the violent ones to reduce their attacks on teachers.
If the DMV wants its golden geese, the residents who pay the lion’s share of the area’s punishingly high taxes, to stay put, then it ought to cut those who have opted to put their children in private schools a tax break.
The complicated-seeming One Big Beautiful Bill Act federal tax credit of up to $1,700 for nonprofit donations, which can ultimately be put toward private school tuition, doesn’t much help middle- and upper-middle-class Americans. These families are able (though often only with financial aid) to pay for exorbitantly expensive private schools in the area, but they must budget strictly and make sacrifices to do so.
They deserve to pay less in taxes that fund ever-more-expensive but poor-quality public schools. If they do, then they will be better able to afford decent education at safe, high-quality institutions.
They are the kinds of residents the area should want to keep.
• Anath Hartmann is deputy commentary editor for The Washington Times.
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