Recently in Education Category

Former IBM CEO Louis Gerstner had an interesting piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, in which he suggests a handful of education reform options:

"- Abolish all local school districts, save 70 (50 states; 20 largest cities). Some states may choose to leave some of the rest as community service organizations, but they would have no direct involvement in the critical task of establishing standards, selecting teachers, and developing curricula.

- Establish a set of national standards for a core curriculum. I would suggest we start with four subjects: reading, math, science and social studies.

- Establish a National Skills Day on which every third, sixth, ninth and 12th-grader would be tested against the national standards. Results would be published nationwide for every school in America.

- Establish national standards for teacher certification and require regular re-evaluations of teacher skills. Increase teacher compensation to permit the best teachers (as measured by advances in student learning) to earn well in excess of $100,000 per year, and allow school leaders to remove underperforming teachers.

- Extend the school day and the school year to effectively add 20 more days of schooling for all K-12 students."

This is an interesting mix of approaches, some more promising than others. The idea that the state can run schools more efficiently than smaller districts can is questionable, to say the least. I can't think of anything the state does efficiently. I expect national standards to get a big push, though - it is popular on both sides of the aisle. Why? Because it is clear that the Feds made a mistake in allowing each state to set their own achievement benchmarks.  As a result, there is enormous variation from state to state with regard to what constitutes "proficiency" in reading, for example. National testing will likely follow national standards. The NAEP test, administered by the U.S. Department of Education, is generally seen as an effective national test, against which many states benchmark their own state tests.  Extending the school day and year makes sense - we trail many nations in the amount of schooling we ask kids to do - but only if the schools become more effective at what they do. Having kids spend more time in bad schools makes no sense at all.

Gerstner's fourth suggestion, related to teacher quality, is, in my mind, the key piece.  None of the rest of it matters if you do not have top-quality teachers in the classroom. It is also the most controversial piece of the puzzle, as it would require the recently-elected Obama administration to take on the recalcitrant teachers' unions, who are reflexively resistant to any attempt to tie teacher pay to student outcomes, or to make it easier to remove ineffective teachers.  Whether President-Elect Obama is willing to move forward on teacher quality issues in defiance of the unions will determine the extent to which he is serious about making the kind of profound changes to our schools that leaders like Gerstner are suggesting.

Who he selects as an Education Secretary may tell us a great deal about the answer to that very question.

The Bangor Daily News was good enough to publish an op-ed I wrote on the subject of school choice.  It will be interesting to see what kind of a response it generates...

Over on our school choice website, http://maineschoolchoice.ning.com, Karen Balas-Coté, who helped lead the effort to preserve school choice in Orland, provides a quick overview of what the Orland school choice supporters did in their successful effort to save choice:

Choice advocates in Orland talked among parents, got phone numbers and e-mails, and solicited donations from parents to send out a saturation mailing to every Orland resident that had many points on why Orland should keep school choice, how to vote to keep school choice, and a copy of the very lengthy and confusing ballot so people could understand what they were voting on before they went into the voting booth.

We also put up around 10 large, simple to read, signs telling people which way to vote to keep school choice, in strategic locations about 2 weeks before the vote. We also talked to Heads of Schools where the majority of Orland students who choose high schools other than Bucksport attend. They were helpful with general information and even sent out a letter to current parents and alumni advocating school choice and getting out to vote.

Additionally, we encouraged parents and alumni who attended other area high schools to write letters to the editors of local newspapers in support of school choice and why.

In other words, a good old fashioned grassroots effort, done on a shoestring and pulled off by dedicated volunteers.  It is important to note how little time they had to do this - opponents of choice started circulating a petition to get rid of it in early September.  That left Karen and her allies only a few weeks to organize the all-out effort she describes.

Some good lessons here as we move forward, though some of the battles, I think, will be in Augusta, which will require a different approach and much larger and more organized coalition of supporters.

MHPC has done quite a bit of work to publicize the fact that school choice in Maine is under threat. Is it possible that school choice could be expanded as a result of consolidation?

The Times Record reports that residents of Wiscasset, which is destined to be the only non-choice district in its new RSU, are thinking about extending school choice to their own students.  The article is tremdously revealing about the motives of the two sides.

On the side favoring choice, you have this argument:

Smith noted that, with school enrollment falling and no sign the other seven towns would send students or funding to Wiscasset to help combat the dropoff, the high school could continue to wither away. If the disappearance in funding and programs reached severe enough levels, he argued, it would be unfair of the town not to allow its students to seek better educations elsewhere.

"If we can't save the high school, isn't our obligation to the students?" asked Smith.

In other words, for the good of the children, we have to provide the best options available, and if that means closing a school to which kids don't want to go, then so be it.

The argument on the other side is that for the good of the school, we need to avoid giving kids a choice:

However, School Committee Chairman Gene Stover remained worried that opening the door of school choice would exacerbate what he described as the "exodus we're experiencing from Alna and Westport Island."

Alna and Westport Island had already been partnered with Wiscasset before the larger consolidation talks began, but as Smith noted, "one-third of the Westport Island kids choose schools other than Wiscasset due to misconceptions about the quality of our schools."

Allowing Wiscasset's own students to leave, too, argued Stover, would be a bad idea.

"We've got to combat this business of people leaving because of what they perceive as programs that aren't as good as other schools."

I find this line of thinking facsinating. The kids that have choice are voting with their feet and leaving the schools.  They are doing so, Mr. Stover suggests, because of "perceptions" that the schools are not that good.

His solution, evidently, is not to deal with the perception issue (or what may be underlying perfomance issues), but simply to use the law to prevent students from leaving.

It says something about how ingrained the public school monopoly model has become that nobody gets worked up about trapping kids in underperforming schools. "So what if kids want to leave - we won't make the school better, we'll just prevent them from leaving."

Someday we'll look back at this era and be amazed that people put up put up with this...

An article from today's New York Post details the choice facing President-Elect and Mrs.Obama as they look to move to Washington in January - to which school will they send their kids?

Most Americans, of course, don't have that choice to make. They are forced to attend the public school assigned to them by the state unless they can afford to go elsewhere.  Many Maine communities offer school choice, though fewer and fewer all the time.

Future Mom-in-Chief Michelle Obama flew into DC ahead of her husband yesterday on a reconnaissance mission to scope out private schools for her two daughters.

She headed first to the tony Georgetown Day School, an ultra-progressive prep school where students and their teachers are on a first-name basis.

After Georgetown, Michelle headed to Sidwell, a liberal Quaker school that many consider the front-runner in the heated Race for the Schoolhouse.

Still to be visited is Maret, a college-prep school with an emphasis on sports.

The DC public schools made an unsuccessful push for Chelsea Clinton back in 1992, but it seems unlikely the Obama girls will end up in a city school.

What is even more amazing about this article are the long lists of prominent Democrats with kids at each of these ritzy private schools.  It amazes me that these people are never called on the carpet for the blatant hypocrisy of denying ordinary people the same school choice rights they enjoy.  They are all very supportive of D.C. public schools until they have to send their own kids there...Unbelievable.

Turns out, more folks are prepared to merge school districts than I had anticipated.  I predicted in this space that about half of the consolidation plans sent out to voters would pass, turns out that 12 of 18 did.

I had thought opposition in Freeport would spell the end of that plan, with opposition in SAD 38 sinking its merger with SAD 48.  Wishful thinking, I guess - both those plans will end school choice for a number of students.

A number of plans are still waiting to go, and plans that were rejected still have time to be reworked and put back in front of voters in January.  The big question will be whether the state moves forward to impose penalties on those districts not in compliance.  They are likely to if most plans pass, unlikely to if most plans fail, I would guess.  So far, 2 out of 3 are passing, which will embolden the administration to keep pushing the merger effort forward in the face of what is likely to be at least some legislative opposition.

Democrats have built large majorities in both the Senate and House. Will they oppose the administration's effort?  Unlikely. Consolidation is here to stay.

Not a great Election Day as far as I'm concerned, but there was one bright note.  Voters in Raymond and Orland both voted to preserve school choice.

The vote in Orland was very close, 671 to 644.  That means Orland will continue to have at least some school choice after merging with Bucksport, assuming the merger plan passes when the time comes. That plan would limit high school choice in Orland to only 35% of students. The other 65% will be required to attend Bucksport High School.

School choice in Raymond was upheld by a better than two-to-one margin, 1923 to 788.  This means Raymond will keep choice after merging with Windham.  This is a truly great win considering that much of the school board and the school administration were adamantly against choice.

The battle is not over yet.  We're still learning the outcomes with regard to a handful of consolidation plans dealing with school choice, though it looks as though the Freeport-Durham-Pownal merger will go through, ending choice for students in Pownal and Durham.

Stay tuned...

Our friends at the University of Maine have just released a report, done in cooperation with the Penquis Superintendents' Association, which shows that preserving school choice was a critical issue for many communities in Maine as they faced the school district consolidation mandate, enough so that it was seen as a major barrier.

Consider the following findings form the report:

Page 23: Developing a partnership with a community that had school choice was a concern of many respondents. The possibility that these communities would send students to high schools outside the RSU was a major concern and many school choice communities were adamant that school choice be preserved. Although the reorganization law protects school choice, many involved in the RPC process expressed doubts about the stability of protections. One superintendent expressed this as follows,

"Where the law allowed for choice, that the choice might remain. There's a great
deal of mistrust in the state government. One of the things I consistently heard from
people was: "Well, that's what the law says right now, but what about five years
from now?"

Page 33: On the survey, 93% of the RPC member respondents indicated that potential
loss of local control was a significant/ highly significant challenge...65% indicated that
concern about loss of school choice in some communities was significant.

Page 34: A community representative said, "What citizens in my town wanted, we wanted to stay in control of our schools and we want to keep school choice--high school choice. That may be the biggest issue. . . . The law is written to say that school choice will stay, but we were suspicious. We felt that over time, there would be pressure to send our kids to
[high school A]

Page 73:  The findings from this research suggest that the lack of support for school district reorganization is rooted in four fundamental problems: 1) pressure from time constraints and mandates; 2) lack of confidence in the stability of the initiative; 3) lack of credibility of primary goals; and 4) threats to local values around governance and school choice.


It is good to see such strong support for school choice still out there across Maine. Now let's hope the people in Raymond and Orland, both of whom will vote on whether or not to keep school choice next week, have the same passion for keeping their school choice rights...

It has been a few weeks since the last update on the education blog.  A few news stories of note:

• Skip Greenlaw's Maine Coalition to Save Schools submitted 61,142 signatures to repeal the school consolidation law, several thousand more than the 55,087 needed to put the issue before voters.  The Secretary of State's office will be validating the signatures over the next few months, and there is the risk that the group may fall short.  Fed Up With Taxes, the group working to repeal the Dirigo Tax, collected more than 95,000 signatures for that initiative, but the Secretary of State's office validated only 72,432. If Greenlaw's group wasn't any more careful than Fed Up With Taxes, they may fall short even with a 6000 signature buffer.  Stay tuned...

• Just weeks after it was reported that the Maine Department of Education covered up news of abysmally poor scores on last year's 8th grade MEA writing test, the Department has announced plans to cancel this spring's 5th and 8th grade tests entirely, replacing them with a different test to be administered next fall.  Citing the high costs of the MEA writing test, which requires human, rather than machine scoring, the Department plans to replace the test with the New England Common Assessment Test, a joint project of three other New England states.  The Maine Heritage Policy Center will do a fuller analysis of this change in the weeks to come, but two initial thoughts spring to mind.  First, the good news is that using a common test will allow easier comparisons between the achievement of Maine's schools and students and those of Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire, which also administer the test.  What I am wondering, though, is how well the NECAP test is matched against Maine's learning standards.  We don't want a situation where schools are teaching to Maine standards, only to have their students assessed against completely different standards.  The Department is claiming this move will save money, but is it good for students, teachers, and schools?

• The KJ's Matt Stone recently reported the findings of an interesting survey of school district consolidation committees.  It found a high degree of skepticism among regionalization planners, nearly half of whom anticipated their consolidation plans would be turned down by voters.  The planners cited a shortage of time to do community outreach and a lack of real budget savings from consolidation as reasons for likely opposition from voters.  We'll find out soon enough.  According to the Department, 17 consolidation plans will go before voters on November 4th.
  

•  The Department of Education is already warning districts to expect a state funding freeze for perhaps the next two years. As the Sun Journal reveals, state funding for schools is up about $250 million since 2005, and the school districts that appear to be in trouble are the ones that grew school spending as a result. Those that funneled the increased state funding into property tax relief, which is what voters demanded when they approved the 55% provision back in 2004, will be hit less hard - they simply didn't grow their budgets as much.  No doubt more news on the budget will come when new revenue projections are done - after the election.

• The presidential election, of course, will have a profound impact of federal education policy. We'll report on what those impacts may be once we know for sure who will be running the show come January 20 of 2009.
  

It's here!

Maine people now have the ability to actually see the Public Information needed to understand how the State of Maine spends tax dollars.

This new Web site is a searchable, downloadable database of Maine's Payroll, Pension and other Spending accounts for 2006 and 2007. 

Search by category to see what your Tax Dollars buy.  Do research on state vendors and the state agencies who buy their goods and services.

 -  Curious about how many Maine State employees make more than the Governor? 

 -  Want to know how much the State of Maine buys from New York companies?

 -  Ever wonder what Maine spends on airline tickets?

 

It's easy to find out at MaineOpenGov.Org