The Maine Department of Education has drafted legislation that would require students to prove they have reached the standards laid out in the state’s new Learning Results before they get their high school diplomas. Graduation and the K-12 educational benchmarks that became law three years ago would be tied together starting with the graduating Class of 2007.

The class that starts high school in September 2003 and graduates in June 2007 would have to meet the Learning Results in five content areas – English, math, science, social studies and health – in order to graduate, said Deputy Education Commissioner Judy Lucarelli.

“If we don’t put accountability into the Learning Results,” Lucarelli said Friday, “they aren’t standards, they are just teaching guidelines.”

But state education department officials are adamant that the 16-year-old Maine Educational Assessment will not be used as a high school exit exam. Instead, it will be up to local school districts, with state help, to develop an array of ways to measure whether students have met the Learning Results.

“We are proposing linking graduation requirements to the Learning Results based on local assessment systems,” Lucarelli said. “So, it’s up to local school boards to determine who earns a diploma. The department is not recommending or supporting that the MEA become an exit exam.”

While agreeing that accountability needs to be injected into the Learning Results, the Maine Education Association, the state’s major teachers’ union, has “specific reservations” about tying a high school diploma to the system, said its president, Idella Harter. Those reservations concern money.

“Our stance is hardening,” she said. “If there is no state money, the Learning Results should become a local option. You can’t mandate it and not fund it.”

Harter said the diploma and the standards should not be linked until an additional $140 million is added to the amount spent on K-12 public education in the state. That is the sum recommended by a subcommittee of the State Board of Education that is studying the essential programs and services that are needed for every Maine student to attain the Learning Results. The money would be used for a host of things from hiring new teachers to buying books.

Under the department’s proposed legislation, that level of funding would not be reached until 2006-07, the senior year of the first class expected to attain the Learning Results, Harter said. The money won’t be there for the work needed to make sure that first class is able to reach the standards.

So, according to union officials, either the link to the diploma must be pushed back until 2010 at the earliest, or the money should be in place come 2002-03, the year the Learning Results are supposed to be fully implemented.

“We say it should be fully funded [in 2002-03] so that there is equal opportunity for students across the state to meet these benchmarks,” said Steve Crouse, the union’s legislative lobbyist. “If you’re serious about it, you provide the money upfront rather than put it off.”

Harter, the union president, chastised Gov. Angus King’s administration saying that it seems to be interested in mandating the Learning Results on its watch, but pushing the costs off onto future administrations.

But Deputy Education Commissioner Lucarelli said the additional $140 million for essential programs and services is a combination of state and local funds.

That and the fact that King has recommended increasing state aid to local schools by 5 percent, raising the total to $697 million, in the state budget he released this week, means “we’re already about 90 percent of the way there,” Lucarelli countered. “We feel we have the resources to say that graduation can be based on the Learning Results in 2007.”

The first five content areas are nothing new, she added. More troublesome are the three additional content areas of performing arts, foreign languages and career preparation. Full implementation of these areas has been put off until 2006-07.

Local school officials are worried about these subjects, she said. Many schools have no facilities for performing arts programs, and well over 200 new teachers will be needed around the state to implement the foreign language requirements.

In King’s just released state budget plan, the education department has included $1 million a year for two years to help school districts develop assessment systems.

It is critical for the state to ensure that school districts have resources to build those systems in the next two years, said Lucarelli.

During the coming two school years, the department will determine the necessary components of an assessment system.

The system could include projects, chapter tests, term papers, portfolios and standardized tests, she said. “But it will not just be standardized tests. We’re making it clear the MEAs are not the only measurement.”

The goal is to have the local assessments developed, refined and in place by the end of the 2002-03 school year.

The Maine Education Association has worries concerning sufficient resources for developing valid, defensible local assessments. The union worries about the cost and potential legal challenges.

“Those assessments have to stand the test of lawsuits,” Harter said. “In some school district an angry family will sue because their child didn’t get a diploma. This will be high-stakes graduation.”