Before the recent election, I was approached by an educated and concerned friend of above average income who said he was going to vote for the Republican candidates.
I acknowledged that Republicans on occasion have what I believe to be the preferable position on issues facing our state and country, but wondered what had motivated his decision. The reply was that he was fed up with government waste and high taxes.
I asked him what waste did he have in mind. The response was, "Let's start with all the money wasted on public schools in the city."
It turned out that my friend had his child in a local private school where he paid $9,500 in annual tuition. His private school also required parents to pay for books. Additional funds are raised by solicitation of parents and alumni for contributions and income from the school's endowment. None of the children in the private school are special-education children, and all had been admitted after being assessed for their intellectual capacity. Any child not fitting in could be expelled. The parents of children in this school are highly educated and very interested in their children's education. Transportation costs to and from school are paid by the parents.
Compare this to the Baltimore City Public Schools, where this year $5,800 will be spent per child.
The public schools must take all children. In Baltimore, 67 percent of the children who attend its public schools are so poor they are eligible for a free or reduced-price lunch. Furthermore, 18 percent of the city's public-school students are special-education students, all of whom cost more to educate; some cost more than $100,000 a year because of severe disabilities. The public schools, because of their parents' low income, receive little in the way of parental monetary contributions, and alumni contributions are negligible. The public schools, of course, pay for all books and transportation for those children who must take the bus. The average public-school parent has not attended, much less graduated, from college.
The children at the private school probably receive an excellent education, and my friend is to be praised for sacrificing financially to send his child there. But for him to conclude that public schools are wasting money is hard to defend: The evidence would indicate that they are in fact managing their limited resourcesprudently, and that far from wasting money they appear to be making the taxpayers' money go quite far.
There are, of course, religious schools that cost less than public schools per child but the saving is due almost totally to lower teacher salaries and benefits and the absence of special-education students.
A similar lack of reality attaches to this friend and many others who are concerned about being overtaxed. They point to the fact that our state income tax is the fifth highest in the nation. What he did not know, because this fact is usually buried in newspaper stories and ignored by those who rail against taxes, is that Maryland's total tax burden ranks 36th among the states and that the citizens of the United States pay less in taxes per capita than almost any other of the world's industrialized countries.
While these other, more highly taxed countries may be wasting public money, it is relevant to note that compared with these countries we have by far the highest infant-mortality rate, the highest incarceration rate and the highest gap between our rich and poor.
Increasingly, seemingly reasonable persons in this country are focusing on waste and taxes as major issues rather than on the appalling condition of a growing number of our community's children, and on growing income disparity between the rich and everyone else.
The response I should have given my friend but didn't, is this: In elections to come, we would be better served coming to grips with the idea that the real waste here is in perpetuating myths that do much to create problems but little to solve them.
I= Robert C. Embry Jr. is president of the Abell Foundation.