Education: July 2009 Archives

With state budget writers confronting a growing deficit, Maine's K-12 education spending, which is the largest single expenditure of state dollars, is likely to attract a lot of attention. Undoubtedly, the argument will be made that Maine schools cannot endure further cuts to K-12 spending, and that undertaking such cuts will do irreparable harm to educational outcomes.

That argument has became tougher to make with the release of state K-12 spending data by the U.S. Census Bureau. According to the Bureau's most recent calculations, Maine's 2006-2007 K-12 spending was $11,387, which ranked the state 12th in the nation.

Maine spends $1700 per-pupil more than the national average, says the Census.  With little over 190,000 students in Maine schools, that $1700 per-pupil adds up to $340 million that Maine is spending on its schools over and above the national average.

Are the results we're getting worth that amount of extra spending? Our students do tend to score above national averages on standardized tests, but how much of that is the product of our schools and how much is due to the unique demography of Maine's student population, which is overwhelmingly white and English-speaking?  Wouldn't such a population be expected to exceed national averages for academic performance?

The question of how much educational bang we're getting for the considerable pile of bucks were spending on K-12 education is a critical one for the state's budget writers to answer, especially given these new figures from the Census.

Let's hope the discussion this data prompts is productive.
 

Had the Maine Legislature passed the charter school bill a few weeks ago, we might be watching the development of Maine's first conversion charter school by this point. According to the Bangor Daily News, the town of Greenville, looking for ways to attract young families and economic development to the Moosehead Lake region, are considering converting to a charter school in order to adopt an innovative new approach to teaching and learning:

"We want to do more around the line of environmental education, but because of the constraints of state and federal requirements and mandates, we haven't been able to be as flexible with the program [as] we'd like to be," Union 60 Superintendent Heather Perry said Wednesday.

Perry said school and municipal officials have explored the possibility of the Greenville schools' taking on a quasi-private status to allow that flexibility but found too many barriers. They now have shifted their focus to the possibility of creating the state's first charter school.

"The charter school would allow us to be a little bit more flexible and it would almost operate like an independent school where we could have tuition students from throughout the state and New England," Perry said.

Unfortunately for Greenville, the Maine Legislature defeated the charter school bill, despite the fact that, as the Bangor Daily reported, "the bill had the support of the state Board of Education, the Maine Department of Education, the governor, the House of Representatives and the Maine PTA."

A majority of legislators clearly think that they know better than Greenville residents what is best for Greenville, and until that changes, it is hard to see how the town can move forward with this innovative approach. Still, that towns are thinking in these terms means that they understand how innovative and successful schools can be a tool for economic and community development, even in the most rural parts of Maine. There is hope, therefore, that pressure to pass charter school legislation will continue to mount.

A public forum on charter schools will be held at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 29, in the Greenville High and Middle School library.

 

With the defeat of the charter school bill, Maine took a giant step backward in terms of educational innovation, especially with other states stepping up to the plate in response to the Obama administration's call for the lifting of any caps on the number of charter schools.

There could be some innovative changes coming, though, in the way that Maine's teachers and administrators are paid.

Though it seems to have gone entirely unnoticed at the time, LD 1277, "An Act to Encourage Alternative Compensaton Models for Teachers and Administrators," passed both houses of the legislature with a unanimous vote and was signed into law by the governor despite opposition from the public school establishment.

The bill calls on the Maine Department of Education to "review alternative compensation models established in other states," "prepare and submit an application for federal grant funds from the federal Teacher Incentive Fund and any other applicable federal program to develop a state-based alternative compensation grant program," and then "establish an application process whereby school administrative units may apply to participate in the alternative compensation grant program."

What this means is that the state will help interested school districts access federal funding available for the development of alternative teacher compensation systems.  These systems, which we reviewed in not one, but two issue papers last year, use student performance data as one determinant of teacher and administrator pay.

What is the most important sentence in the new law?  This one: "School administrative units must be encouraged to experiment with any number of alternative compensation models."  So rather than a top-down model designed and run from Augusta, Maine's school districts are going to be freed to investigate different teacher pay models and try out different approaches.

Maine as a center for educational experimentation and innovation? Who'd a thunk it?