If there’s one thing America has mastered, it’s spending astronomical amounts of money on K-12 education without demanding even the slightest return on investment. The latest 2025 K-12 Education Spending Spotlight from the Reason Foundation lays it out in black-and-white: spending keeps soaring, enrollment keeps shrinking, teacher pay keeps lagging, and outcomes are, let’s use the technical term, a mess.
This is not a resource problem. It’s a priority problem. And nowhere is that more obvious than right here in Maryland.
A National System Swimming in Money but Starved of Results
According to Reason’s report, national per-pupil spending jumped from $14,969 in 2002 to $20,322 in 2023, a 35.8% inflation-adjusted increase, and that’s before counting the tidal wave of federal COVID money that districts gleefully burned through like scratch-off winnings. Yet despite record cash levels, nearly 40% of American 4th graders can’t read at a basic level.
If this were a business, shareholders would demand heads roll. In public education, we get hashtags, press conferences, and calls for even more spending.
Meanwhile, teacher salaries, after inflation, fell by 6.1% since 2002. So where is the money going?
A good chunk of it is going into a bureaucratic black hole:
- Non-teaching staff grew by 22.8% over two decades while enrollment grew by only 4.1%.
- Employee benefits exploded by 81%, driven mainly by pension debt and healthcare obligations.
- States like New Jersey and New York spend nearly $8,000 per student on benefits alone.
We’ve built the most expensive adult-employment program in the world and forgotten the reason schools exist: children.
Maryland: A Case Study in Throwing Money Into the Wind
Maryland lawmakers practically sprinted into this national pattern with the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, the state’s massive education reform plan that promises billions in new spending with virtually no accountability mechanism.
Maryland spends an eye-watering $22,000–$25,000 per student, depending on the county, well above the national average, and yet:
- State test scores have declined or stagnated.
- Baltimore City routinely posts some of the worst outcomes among major school districts in the country.
- Teacher shortages persist.
- Counties beg for relief from Blueprint mandates because the bill is coming due, and residents are tapped out.
Montgomery County? They’re now spending over $3 billion a year, with 40% of students not proficient in math and serious safety problems that no amount of “restorative discipline retreats” will fix.
Baltimore City? Still struggling to get potable drinking water and working HVAC systems while spending more per pupil than nearly any central metropolitan area in the country.
If spending alone were the solution, Maryland would be Finland with crabs.
The Enrollment Cliff But Budgets Stay Bloated
Since COVID, the nation has lost 1.2 million public school students. Enrollment is shrinking, but payrolls aren’t. Districts aren’t closing buildings or consolidating staff they’re keeping the system bloated even as fewer children enter the classroom.
Maryland faces the same problem. Families are homeschooling, choosing private schools, or moving out. Yet the Blueprint requires counties to increase funding regardless of enrollment.
Only in government is shrinking demand rewarded with expanded budgets.
Accountability That Never Comes
Reason’s study is clear: education spending is less about kids and more about:
- Pensions
- Expanding bureaucracy
- Maintaining unnecessary facilities
- Layers of administrators whose job descriptions sound like parody
Maryland is a poster child. Every year, we hear that if we don’t fully fund the Blueprint, the sky will fall. But no one explains how record spending has produced record-low performance.
At what point do legislators admit that pouring more water into a leaky bucket is not a strategy?
What Real Reform Would Look Like
If Maryland is serious about improving education, not just funding the appearance of improvement, leaders should focus on three core reforms the Reason study emphasizes:
1. Recommit to Academics
Schools should prioritize reading, writing, math, science not TikTok-inspired activism, endless administrative training, or feel-good initiatives with no measurable outcomes.
2. Get Control of Pension and Benefit Debt
Maryland’s pension system is a fiscal sinkhole. Until benefit costs stop growing faster than classroom spending, teachers and students will remain shortchanged.
3. Right-Size the System
Close under-enrolled schools. Reduce redundant administrative layers. Shift resources from bureaucracy to instruction.
You know the things every private-sector business has to do to survive.
Conclusion: Maryland Needs a Course Correction
Reason’s report offers a sobering reminder: the crisis in public education is not a funding crisis. It’s a structural one.
Maryland politicians keep selling the dream that if we spend a little more $1 billion, $5 billion, $15 billion, kids will magically start reading better. But the numbers don’t lie: spending keeps rising. Scores keep falling. And taxpayers keep footing the bill.
Maryland deserves schools that work for students, not systems that exist to preserve themselves.
If you really want to understand how deep the mismanagement runs—not just in Maryland’s schools but across its broader civic institutions—look no further than Chris Papst’s investigative work on Eye on Baltimore. Papst has spent years dissecting how bureaucratic bloat, political favoritism, and a complete lack of accountability have hollowed out Baltimore’s ability to deliver basic services. His book, “Corruption, Inc.”, reads like a masterclass in how taxpayer dollars vanish into a maze of consultants, half-finished projects, and “equity initiatives” that produce nothing measurable for residents—least of all children trapped in failing schools. The very same patterns Papst documents in Baltimore’s city agencies are alive and well in Maryland’s education system: opaque spending, inflated administrative payrolls, and a culture that rewards excuses instead of results. If state leaders had taken Papst’s findings seriously years ago, we might not be staring down a Blueprint funding crisis built on the delusion that pouring more money into broken structures will magically fix them.
Endnotes
- Reason Foundation, “K-12 Education Spending Spotlight 2025,” November 20, 2025.
- National Center for Education Statistics, NAEP Reading Scores, 2023.
- Maryland State Department of Education, Maryland Report Card Data (2023–2024).
- Montgomery County Public Schools Budget, FY2025.
- Blueprint for Maryland’s Future Funding Mandates, Maryland General Assembly.
- Reason Foundation analysis of teacher salary trends and benefit spending, 2002–2023.
- U.S. Census Bureau, Public School Finance Data, 2023.
Carol Hughes is a contributor for Direct Line News. She can be reached at Carol.Hughes@mcgopclub.com
Direct Line News is a Maryland-based free-access publication committed to the Republican reform tradition.
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