Loudoun County, VA also has falling school enrollments and rising school budgets. This is common in all blue states. The purpose of the school budget is "number go up", the kids are superfluous. If enrollment went to zero I think budgets would still pass.
And you're right that they hide it in increased staffing and padded benefits. Then they can brag that "salaries are so low" even though people don't work summers, have overstaffed do nothing jobs, all of their out of pocket medical costs are $0, and they retire early.
BTW, down in Florida, in addition to universal school vouchers that are exploding in popularity, the state government passed a series of anti-public sector union laws.
I'm not sure DeSantis would do well running a second time.
I think the fundamental problem is that state politics is real politics. Like people pay real taxes and have to balance real budgets and provide real services.
The federal government is an retirement program with 1,787% approval rating even though its bankrupting us and a military that somehow every single president decides its fun to blow shit up.
There just isn't much to do at the federal level. The media voter doesn't want change, not really, and any fundamental change would require landslide majorities that our system just is not going to deliver.
So the best anyone can hope for out of a federal leader is that they leave their state government alone.
Agree. The best a Republic president can do is use executive powers to reduce regulations and give states more flexibility. But taxes and especially spending are pretty much set in stone.
Americans are much better served by effective governors than they are by so called "Conservative" presidents. The one longer term benefit of a "Conservative" president is his/her influence on the Judiciary. Alas, I feel that if Liberals got their wish and fully owned the Judiciary and got the law changed as it wants, state secession would become a very high probability.
As someone who only votes for conservation (conservative) reasons - if any of his staffers has a google search on for his name on substack: based on recent moves like the big conservation easement to celebrate 25 years of the Florida Forever Fund - I absolutely would vote for Desantis for president.
Maryland embraces the "Blue model" of governance which means government spending must increase no matter the outcomes produced. In fact, the worst the outcomes, the more government spending must increase!
Austin ISD has falling enrollment and ballooning budgets, if the drumbeat of news articles from the past few years is accurate.
Someone referenced something called the Coulter Rule below. I propose a Reddit Rule.
If the lefties on reddit are openly complaining about something in a way - and with a specificity - that would not seem to comport with their much more generalized Omnicause worldview, then you can bank on the former.
And that consensus, on Austin reddit, is that an ever-smaller number of people, especially the demographic that has traditionally dominated in the ranks of American public school teachers, are willing to a) put up with classroom behavior; and b) educate children of mystery age who have poured through the border and arrive at school knowing no English and more crucially, having often never been to school at all, to the point (if from parts of Latin America) they may not even read Spanish.
Hours put in after the schoolday, pay, and BS paperwork, and parents making trouble - they have ever complained about.
Openly complaining about those whom they are expected to teach, is something I have seen only in the last couple years.
If you have no vested interest in the continuance of public school, this may all be welcome news. I think it is coming to a crisis. Maybe the incoming cultures will meet that crisis, in their own way. As they do not assimilate, it will be unlike what has gone before. I expect the FAPE lawsuits will go away.
More instructional hours has always been the mantra.
Now school districts down here are going to 4-day weeks - a thing unimaginable to a feminist 40 years ago.
It could be worse. Montgomery co teachers pay into social security so the local taxpayer is only funding part of the retirement benefit. In Illinois, most or all teachers are exempt for social security on their teacher pay so we get to fund their entire pension locally. And we are on the hook for Montgomery co teachers social security.
Here in Texas, when school enrollment declines, schools within that district actually close and the staffing is reduced to align with the declining demand. It is a painful yet efficient process that has been occurring throughout Texas for several years now as the local ISDs grapple with declining enrollment and the decline in related funding. It seems like the opposite may apply in places like Maryland.
Why?
1) Texas bars collective bargaining for teachers. As a result, the unions are mere advocacy organizations as opposed to a political force. There are no strikes nor any cba negotiations. Everything is negotiated at the district level.
2) Texas is a right to work state. Contributions to public unions are voluntary as opposed to mandatory.
3) Texas does not have a state income tax. Schools are primarily funded through local property taxes and, due to the size of property taxes on family budgets, taxpayers are more actively involved in monitoring the impact of those taxes. There isn’t an income tax pool available to bailout the unions from the local fiscal realities.
I appreciate you bringing things down to earth with your commentaries on Montgomery County, Arnold. The phenomenon is very important given that the teachers' unions seem to be the heart of the Democratic Party. Effectively, our tax dollars are used to extract more tax dollars, often explicitly with government entities employing lobbyists at high prices.
The great conundrum in K-12 is how spending per pupil per year ($31k in Palo Alto!?) grows much faster than inflation while the National Assessment of Educational Progress Long Term Trend measure is dead flat to slightly down excluding the lockdown dip? The choices would seem to be 1) the test is uncorrelated with achievement (near impossible), 2) there is no link between inputs and outputs, or 3) something is blocking the connection. Terry Moe (2011) argues for 3, actively blaming the teachers' unions. I am focused on 2, promoting the need for a workflow management system in K-12 to enable plan-do-check-act continuous improvement and letting pedagogies compete openly.
Zooming out, we have the same failure of governance at the local level as we are seeing at the federal level. Recently, it occurred to me that Madison was overly optimistic that we could sustain a "balance" of competing branches to limit government. Even a simple bathroom scale quickly gets out of whack. At the end of the day, the branches of government are all on the side of more government, which is just another organization differentiated by the presence of paying in votes and using guns to collect from A so B can give the money to C.
In the case of Education funding, they exploit the naive voter's false intuition that spending more means better results, which is not a particularly good rule even in free markets. I don't have easy answers, but surely active involvement by us who pay the bills and structural reforms are among them. If we need righteous anger to motivate us, think of the harm these insiders are inflicting on the very outsiders they claim to represent.
Once your kids are going to public school you feel "locked in". They are used to it. They have friends. Maybe they are doing well despite the mediocrity of the product.
If you were offered a voucher you would probably stick with the status quo. Maybe in an alternate world where it was available when your kid was entering kindergarten, but he's in 4th or 8th grade now, you aren't going to rock the boat.
And anyway having to CHOOSE is a lot of work that seems fraught with risks. Do YOU really know what's best for your kid. Maybe it's best to leave that to "the experts".
And so if you're in this mindset, any dollars that leave the public schools are less dollars for your kids. Even if the public schools waste a lot of those dollars, some % is going to trickle down to your kids. And with non-parents paying property taxes too the burden is distributed onto lots of other people.
This is a hard equilibrium to break out of. I think you basically need to have people start on vouchers in Kindergarten and work their way up. It changes a generation at a time. In Florida we are just starting to see new mostly K-8 private schools open to meet the new demand coming from the vouchers. As those kids reach high school age I think we will see more high schools open.
Being close to grandkids remains the decisive issue. If any moved away would you follow them? Have you promised to follow who move to Texas?
The Trump hating states seem likely to get worse, for a few more years, before they get better, or even up to where they were in 2025.
That so many parents accept the Teachers' demands is partly due to a failure of low tax folks to focus on staff increases, not higher teacher pay or better treatment.
The inability of teachers to fail kids, mean more kids will be passed w/o doing the work of learning, or even the work of learning to read & reading.
Getting more Reps as professors at elite schools will, after some 4-12 year lag, start improving the ability of teachers to disagree peacefully, with rational arguments.
I'd tell Arnold it sounds like the grass is greener in Austin but the one thing Maryland has going for it is green grass (except in the heat of August).
The Bermuda grasses of Texas are highly drought tolerant. No issues in finding green grass over here during July or August. Besides, the irrigation rates in Travis County are lower than those in Montgomery County.
In Montgomery County's and MCPS downward spiral, how much of a contribution did the Black population make? In the extra hiring for school specialists? Turnstile fare jumpers? I notice that the perpetrator's race was not mentioned. The Coulter Rule: The longer it takes to identify the race of a perpetrator, the more you know they're not White. I realize that the greater D.C. area is liberal Democrat.
In terms of the most fascinating culture in the U.S., most people try to self isolate from them as much as possible in their area of domicile. Same goes for the purposeful avoidance of Frontier Airlines, Carnival Cruises, Ruth Chris Steakhouse and the like.
“If the web browser LLM is to be believed, Montgomery County offers lower health insurance premiums, more affordable care, and better access than Austin, Texas, due to Maryland’s regulated health care system, higher insurance coverage, and stronger population health outcomes.”
That sounds like a menagerie of contradictions. In short, the LLM is probably hallucinating particularly as it relates to the completely objective measure known as “health outcomes.”
Loudoun County, VA also has falling school enrollments and rising school budgets. This is common in all blue states. The purpose of the school budget is "number go up", the kids are superfluous. If enrollment went to zero I think budgets would still pass.
And you're right that they hide it in increased staffing and padded benefits. Then they can brag that "salaries are so low" even though people don't work summers, have overstaffed do nothing jobs, all of their out of pocket medical costs are $0, and they retire early.
BTW, down in Florida, in addition to universal school vouchers that are exploding in popularity, the state government passed a series of anti-public sector union laws.
https://floridaphoenix.com/2026/03/11/florida-legislature-approves-restrictions-on-public-sector-unions/
There is meaningful legislative change coming from the Republican Party, but its all at the state level.
"DeSantis-Milei 2028!"
I'm not sure DeSantis would do well running a second time.
I think the fundamental problem is that state politics is real politics. Like people pay real taxes and have to balance real budgets and provide real services.
The federal government is an retirement program with 1,787% approval rating even though its bankrupting us and a military that somehow every single president decides its fun to blow shit up.
There just isn't much to do at the federal level. The media voter doesn't want change, not really, and any fundamental change would require landslide majorities that our system just is not going to deliver.
So the best anyone can hope for out of a federal leader is that they leave their state government alone.
Agree. The best a Republic president can do is use executive powers to reduce regulations and give states more flexibility. But taxes and especially spending are pretty much set in stone.
Americans are much better served by effective governors than they are by so called "Conservative" presidents. The one longer term benefit of a "Conservative" president is his/her influence on the Judiciary. Alas, I feel that if Liberals got their wish and fully owned the Judiciary and got the law changed as it wants, state secession would become a very high probability.
As someone who only votes for conservation (conservative) reasons - if any of his staffers has a google search on for his name on substack: based on recent moves like the big conservation easement to celebrate 25 years of the Florida Forever Fund - I absolutely would vote for Desantis for president.
Maryland embraces the "Blue model" of governance which means government spending must increase no matter the outcomes produced. In fact, the worst the outcomes, the more government spending must increase!
Austin ISD has falling enrollment and ballooning budgets, if the drumbeat of news articles from the past few years is accurate.
Someone referenced something called the Coulter Rule below. I propose a Reddit Rule.
If the lefties on reddit are openly complaining about something in a way - and with a specificity - that would not seem to comport with their much more generalized Omnicause worldview, then you can bank on the former.
And that consensus, on Austin reddit, is that an ever-smaller number of people, especially the demographic that has traditionally dominated in the ranks of American public school teachers, are willing to a) put up with classroom behavior; and b) educate children of mystery age who have poured through the border and arrive at school knowing no English and more crucially, having often never been to school at all, to the point (if from parts of Latin America) they may not even read Spanish.
Hours put in after the schoolday, pay, and BS paperwork, and parents making trouble - they have ever complained about.
Openly complaining about those whom they are expected to teach, is something I have seen only in the last couple years.
If you have no vested interest in the continuance of public school, this may all be welcome news. I think it is coming to a crisis. Maybe the incoming cultures will meet that crisis, in their own way. As they do not assimilate, it will be unlike what has gone before. I expect the FAPE lawsuits will go away.
More instructional hours has always been the mantra.
Now school districts down here are going to 4-day weeks - a thing unimaginable to a feminist 40 years ago.
This to persuade women to come back and teach.
It could be worse. Montgomery co teachers pay into social security so the local taxpayer is only funding part of the retirement benefit. In Illinois, most or all teachers are exempt for social security on their teacher pay so we get to fund their entire pension locally. And we are on the hook for Montgomery co teachers social security.
Texas vs. Maryland
Here in Texas, when school enrollment declines, schools within that district actually close and the staffing is reduced to align with the declining demand. It is a painful yet efficient process that has been occurring throughout Texas for several years now as the local ISDs grapple with declining enrollment and the decline in related funding. It seems like the opposite may apply in places like Maryland.
Why?
1) Texas bars collective bargaining for teachers. As a result, the unions are mere advocacy organizations as opposed to a political force. There are no strikes nor any cba negotiations. Everything is negotiated at the district level.
2) Texas is a right to work state. Contributions to public unions are voluntary as opposed to mandatory.
3) Texas does not have a state income tax. Schools are primarily funded through local property taxes and, due to the size of property taxes on family budgets, taxpayers are more actively involved in monitoring the impact of those taxes. There isn’t an income tax pool available to bailout the unions from the local fiscal realities.
I appreciate you bringing things down to earth with your commentaries on Montgomery County, Arnold. The phenomenon is very important given that the teachers' unions seem to be the heart of the Democratic Party. Effectively, our tax dollars are used to extract more tax dollars, often explicitly with government entities employing lobbyists at high prices.
The great conundrum in K-12 is how spending per pupil per year ($31k in Palo Alto!?) grows much faster than inflation while the National Assessment of Educational Progress Long Term Trend measure is dead flat to slightly down excluding the lockdown dip? The choices would seem to be 1) the test is uncorrelated with achievement (near impossible), 2) there is no link between inputs and outputs, or 3) something is blocking the connection. Terry Moe (2011) argues for 3, actively blaming the teachers' unions. I am focused on 2, promoting the need for a workflow management system in K-12 to enable plan-do-check-act continuous improvement and letting pedagogies compete openly.
Zooming out, we have the same failure of governance at the local level as we are seeing at the federal level. Recently, it occurred to me that Madison was overly optimistic that we could sustain a "balance" of competing branches to limit government. Even a simple bathroom scale quickly gets out of whack. At the end of the day, the branches of government are all on the side of more government, which is just another organization differentiated by the presence of paying in votes and using guns to collect from A so B can give the money to C.
In the case of Education funding, they exploit the naive voter's false intuition that spending more means better results, which is not a particularly good rule even in free markets. I don't have easy answers, but surely active involvement by us who pay the bills and structural reforms are among them. If we need righteous anger to motivate us, think of the harm these insiders are inflicting on the very outsiders they claim to represent.
Once your kids are going to public school you feel "locked in". They are used to it. They have friends. Maybe they are doing well despite the mediocrity of the product.
If you were offered a voucher you would probably stick with the status quo. Maybe in an alternate world where it was available when your kid was entering kindergarten, but he's in 4th or 8th grade now, you aren't going to rock the boat.
And anyway having to CHOOSE is a lot of work that seems fraught with risks. Do YOU really know what's best for your kid. Maybe it's best to leave that to "the experts".
And so if you're in this mindset, any dollars that leave the public schools are less dollars for your kids. Even if the public schools waste a lot of those dollars, some % is going to trickle down to your kids. And with non-parents paying property taxes too the burden is distributed onto lots of other people.
This is a hard equilibrium to break out of. I think you basically need to have people start on vouchers in Kindergarten and work their way up. It changes a generation at a time. In Florida we are just starting to see new mostly K-8 private schools open to meet the new demand coming from the vouchers. As those kids reach high school age I think we will see more high schools open.
How very successful the teachers’ union has been. Remind me again, what is the mission of our public schools?
Being close to grandkids remains the decisive issue. If any moved away would you follow them? Have you promised to follow who move to Texas?
The Trump hating states seem likely to get worse, for a few more years, before they get better, or even up to where they were in 2025.
That so many parents accept the Teachers' demands is partly due to a failure of low tax folks to focus on staff increases, not higher teacher pay or better treatment.
The inability of teachers to fail kids, mean more kids will be passed w/o doing the work of learning, or even the work of learning to read & reading.
Getting more Reps as professors at elite schools will, after some 4-12 year lag, start improving the ability of teachers to disagree peacefully, with rational arguments.
I'd tell Arnold it sounds like the grass is greener in Austin but the one thing Maryland has going for it is green grass (except in the heat of August).
The Bermuda grasses of Texas are highly drought tolerant. No issues in finding green grass over here during July or August. Besides, the irrigation rates in Travis County are lower than those in Montgomery County.
Drought tolerant and green are antonyms in this instance.
You’re just doing it wrong and blaming it on fancy grammar terms like antonyms…
Nah, the Bermuda grass, always sparse to begin with, dies back. It is indistinguishable from no grass at all.
In Montgomery County's and MCPS downward spiral, how much of a contribution did the Black population make? In the extra hiring for school specialists? Turnstile fare jumpers? I notice that the perpetrator's race was not mentioned. The Coulter Rule: The longer it takes to identify the race of a perpetrator, the more you know they're not White. I realize that the greater D.C. area is liberal Democrat.
In terms of the most fascinating culture in the U.S., most people try to self isolate from them as much as possible in their area of domicile. Same goes for the purposeful avoidance of Frontier Airlines, Carnival Cruises, Ruth Chris Steakhouse and the like.
“If the web browser LLM is to be believed, Montgomery County offers lower health insurance premiums, more affordable care, and better access than Austin, Texas, due to Maryland’s regulated health care system, higher insurance coverage, and stronger population health outcomes.”
That sounds like a menagerie of contradictions. In short, the LLM is probably hallucinating particularly as it relates to the completely objective measure known as “health outcomes.”