WPost: Md. teachers unions, school boards fight for stronger financing law

...But the details of Maryland’s maintenance of effort law have proved unwieldy in tough budget times. Its authors never anticipated a housing bubble nor articulated a logical process for working through it.
The debate has largely played out in Montgomery County. The county’s nationally recognized schools have long been a generously protected fiscal priority, and the county council exceeded minimum spending levels by hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade. When the budget outlook worsened, though, the county council said it couldn’t maintain the same level of investment.
“The county government was hurt by the fact that we were doing over and above what we were required to do,” said council president Valerie Ervin (D-Silver Spring), a former school board member.
The council, with support from the Board of Education, applied for a waiver from the law for each of the past three years. The request was declined by the state board of education in the first year and granted in the second year. In the third year, the council simply withdrew the request after the state board issued a ruling that the waiver process was not required by the law. Instead, the council accepted a $26 million penalty, which has been deferred into next year...

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