Maryland Gov. Wes Moore is proposing to significantly reshape the state’s signature public school improvement plan in hopes of eliminating costs while redirecting some of those savings to new literacy, math and teacher recruitment efforts.

Moore sent his legislation to state lawmakers on Tuesday, marking the starting point of negotiations on the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, a law that’s been a priority for Democratic leaders, some of whom have been reluctant to consider changes.

The Democratic governor’s plan would save the state more than $1.6 billion over the next four years, by reeling in some expensive programs that would be difficult to implement and spending some of the money in different areas.

Moore would pull back on plans to give teachers more out-of-classroom planning time and pause increases in funding for high-need community schools. With some of the savings, he’d trickle out more funding to recruit teachers and better coach them on how to teach reading and math.

“If we are to provide excellence in education throughout Maryland, we must work towards the Blueprint’s primary goals and strategies, while making it fit our current needs and realities in a post-pandemic environment,” Moore said in a statement.

Moore said his bill, the Excellence in Maryland Public Schools Act, will “propose strategic investments” in education that will help implement key goals of the Blueprint.

Maryland State School Superintendent Carey Wright said the goal of the governor’s proposal is “to show that these investments are, in fact, producing the results for children, particularly for those children that are living in poverty and the children that struggle to learn.”

Moore, who supported the Blueprint before he entered politics, has said that he wants to focus on what makes students succeed rather than being beholden to funding formulas laid out in law. As a candidate, he said that “fully funding and implementing” the Blueprint would be a top priority.

“Our fidelity is to students, not formulas,” Moore said during a speech in December, a perspective that he has repeated since then.

Lawmakers created and passed the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future in 2020 with the aim to restore the state’s public schools to among the best in the nation. They directed some streams of money into a dedicated Blueprint fund, but as the programs ramp up, the fund is projected to fall short of the money it needs starting in two years. If the state’s general fund is used to make up the difference, it drives a massive projected structural deficit in the budget.

Moore’s proposed changes — if approved by lawmakers — would help close some of that gap.

But Democratic leaders of the Maryland General Assembly have offered mixed perspectives on how much they are willing to change the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.

House of Delegates Speaker Adrienne A. Jones has said her chamber will have “a high bar” for any significant changes to the Blueprint — a bar that Del. Ben Barnes, chair of the House Appropriations Committee and one of her top lieutenants, said has not been met.

Barnes told reporters last week that with the Blueprint funded for the next two years, any conversation of changes should be separate from negotiations over how to balance the state’s budget next year.

The Blueprint addresses areas of education “that have been historically and systematically neglected,” like focusing on how to help low-income students succeed, and reversing course would be a mistake, said Barnes, a Democrat representing Prince George’s and Anne Arundel counties.

“The Blueprint is one of the most important pieces of legislation that we have enacted in the state of Maryland in several decades,” Senate President Bill Ferguson, a Baltimore Democrat, said last week. “It is something that we should be proud of as we implement it with fidelity.

Ferguson also noted that the Blueprint fund has enough money for now, and it has scheduled check-ins for how well the programs are working in a couple years.

Ferguson, a former teacher, said the Blueprint likely needs some adjustments, but for now, “we are in a good place.”

Cost savings sought

In Moore’s proposal, the biggest cost savings to the state would come from hitting pause on a program called “collaborative time” that would gradually give teachers more time away from students to work on professional development and planning.

Collaborative time was one of the programs designed to fulfill a Blueprint goal of elevating the teaching profession, following research that shows that when teachers teach fewer classes, test scores are higher.

The program would be difficult to implement because there aren’t enough teachers available to cover all the classroom teaching time, and hiring more teachers has proven difficult. Wright said Maryland would need 15,000 more teachers to make collaborative time work, at a time when there’s a teacher shortage and 6,000 of the state’s teachers only have conditional licenses.

Over four years, the state would save $759 million.

Pausing that program affects overall funding for the Blueprint, reducing the amount of money schools get for students living in poverty and students learning English. The combined savings would be about $400 million over four years.

Along with pausing that program, the state also would adjust the extra amount of money required to be spent to teach students who come from poor families or who are learning English.

Moore’s legislation also proposes making changes to community schools, which offer extra services to students and their families in high-need neighborhoods. The governor proposes freezing funding for the state’s hundreds of community schools at current levels for two years, which would save $473 million.

With the savings, Moore wants to put a focus on literacy and math education — something that Wright is known for.

Wright engineered a turnaround in test scores for reading and math in Mississippi, known as the “Mississippi Miracle.”

Moore would send $236 million over four years to the Maryland State Department of Education, which would hire coaches to go into school buildings to train teachers on reading and math teaching techniques.

The state would put $34 million a year into a “Grow Your Own” program that helps paraeducators become licensed teachers, as well as helps conditionally licensed teachers gain full licensure.

The state would also spend:

• $2 million on an ad campaign to recruit teachers
• $4 million to offer relocation bonuses to out-of-state teachers
• $5 million to create an academy to help educators who want to become principals

The net result of cost-cutting and investing in new programs, according to Moore administration officials, is a savings of $1.6 billion over four years.

Josh Michael, the president of the state school board, said the department believes “a key part of implementation is adapting to new realities of 2025.”

“We think this plan adapts to those realities, keeps us on track so that we are able to realize the vision of the Blueprint,” he said.

Baltimore Banner reporter Liz Bowie contributed to this article.

Clarification: This article has been updated to clarify the amount of savings from changing funding levels for students who are English language learners or who are from low-income households.