March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Department of Education

Education is delivered primarily on the local level in Maine; I don’t see why we need a $30 million-a-year bureaucracy in Augusta when we already have hundreds of local school boards and superinendents out in the field.”

That plain language is from “Making a Difference,” the social and political thoughts of candidate Angus King. King achieved his objective, to be governor, now has a commissioner of education, Wayne Mowatt, and the beast, the bureaucracy, awaits.

Last week, the Legislature began some of its most important work this session, examining the budget of the department King used as a poster agency for the need to re-engineer government. The candidate gave this department much thought, and a lot of ink, and offered an insight that the Education Committee should consider before it proceeds with its work:

“I can’t imagine too many areas of our society where we would spend a billion dollars a year (roughly a thousand dollars for every man, woman and child in the state) with practically no definition of what we want for all that money and no real measure of whether we are getting it.”

King is right. Maine has struggled to define what it wants from education. Among the reasons: As is the case with most agencies of government and their missions, political thinking about public education has been filtered through the department. The result, and this is typical of most departments, is bureaucratic clutter.

The Department of Education is part throwback to a rural, isolated, unsophisticated Maine that disappeared at least a generation ago, and part pack horse for a multitude of retraining, school-to-work and technology-driven, business-education-partnership programs that have proliferated in the past 10 years.

In the old Maine, teachers in one-room schoolhouses became principals as communities grew. Principals became superintendents, often by necessity, and without background and training in budget and curriculum. A central department of education developed in response to the need for a shared repository of knowledge. It was a common resource.

Today, superintendents have doctoral degrees in administration, and some have taught budgeting to the bureaucrats. Much of what the department does is superfluous to education in Maine. However, it has grown only larger and more expensive. Now it is King and Mowatt’s $30 million question: What do you do with it?

Here is an illustration from the budget:

The Division of Certification and Placement has a General Fund line of $486,198 for the fiscal year beginning July 1, and $487,298 for the final year of the biennium. Nearly $1 million total. Its mission is to issue teaching and administrative certificates. Its major goal, in its own budget statement, is to ensure that students in public and private schools are educated “by appropriately qualified personnel.”

Meanwhile, over at the Division of Higher Education ($1.4 million-plus in each year of the biennium), Goal 1 is to “assure that institutions of higher education provide appropriate programs for the preparation of Maine educators.” One agency of state government approves the programs and curriculum at the colleges that prepare the teachers. Most (last year, 60 percent) of K-12 classroom teachers received their bachelor’s degree from taxpayer-supported University of Maine System schools, which also gave direction on courses needed for certification and recertification. Teachers undergo local administrative and peer-group scrutiny (at the cost of state and local tax dollars) and must maintain records of courses that are sent to another state agency that decides whether they are qualified.

A suggestion: Teachers could meet certification qualifications while obtaining an undergraduate or advanced degree in an approved curriculum, in or out of Maine. The University of Maine’s College of Education could oversee the entire process.

Supporters of the redundancy may argue that the streamlined UM-supervised system won’t incorporate all the certification bells and whistles ordered by the 1984 education reforms. That should be part of the new plan.

There were 14,545 public school teachers in Maine last year and another 2,000 administrators. During the year, the state successfully processed more than 9,000 applicants for more than 15,000 renewal or initial certificates. Another 4,000 to 5,000 education assistants (ed techs) were authorized.

There’s no evidence that beyond the exercise of good local judgment in filling jobs, requiring a degree from an approved institution and basic courses in education that this state’s certification system improves the quality of classroom teaching. So, simplify. Give the university system responsiblity for educational quality. Let local school districts hire, and teachers teach and aspire to graduate degrees.

Clutter has collected in the department. It will in any bureaucracy. In this case, it is weighing down local school boards, unnecessarily complicating the lives of teachers with layers of duplicative requirements and burdening taxpayers with expenses for which there are no corresponding results.

The candidate, now governor, was right. There are hundreds of school board members and superintendents at the local level, along with thousands of parents trying to improve the quality of education in Maine. Unfortunately, $30 million needed to do the job is tied up in Augusta.


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