The state’s new Learning Results have been widely hailed during the last few years as a great way to help students get a sound education. But now the Department of Education’s proposed rules for implementing the academic standards are coming under increasing fire from a growing number of school officials.

Several superintendents complained this week that when statutory rules governing school standards were revised to accommodate the Learning Results, local control flew out the window.

Schools aren’t being given enough time to put the new plans and policies into place, they said. Worse yet, the requirements are too prescriptive as well as too costly.

“The state has no right to be telling us how to either run our school system, teach our kids or decide what should be taught,” Bangor Superintendent Robert “Sandy” Ervin said.

Superintendent Leonard Ney of SAD 64 (East Corinth area) worried that the implementation rules, issued last month, will provoke a backlash against the new academic standards, which are supposed to make schools more accountable.

“We’ve made tremendous progress implementing the Learning Results, and the profession as a whole has been supportive of a new way of doing business. It would be sad if this were so prescriptive or such a radical change that it dampens the enthusiasm for continuing to move forward,” said Ney.

State officials are on the defensive. Judith Lucarelli, deputy education commissioner, said superintendents have misinterpreted the requirements. The last thing the department wants is to play a bigger role in the workings of local school districts, she said.

At the center of the controversy are proposed rule changes and modifications to state law regarding curriculum, instruction and assessment. Some of them have to be approved by the state Board of Education and others by the Legislature.

Among the rule changes that have gotten superintendents’ collective goat is a proposal that the commissioner approve each school district’s curriculum.

“The state is telling us things to do upfront when [it] should be worried about how well kids are doing, can kids read, their SAT scores and the colleges they’re getting into. [The state] shouldn’t be worrying about how we get there,” Ervin said.

Superintendents said another proposal calling for schools to implement a local assessment system to measure students’ progress on the Learning Results by 2003-2004 is unrealistic.

“There’s no way that’s going to happen,” said Ervin. “There’s not a dozen people in the state who understand the idea of a local assessment system well enough to devise an interlocking system of multiple measures that will certify achievement.”

Students will have to successfully navigate the assessment system in order to get their high school diplomas.

Some superintendents lamented that the new rules essentially will do away with the traditional method of amassing credits to graduate.

“This is changing the whole dynamic of the school,” Ney said. “When you throw out credits you’re changing the focus of the course from the expected daily interaction of teacher and students to more of a performance-based [structure].”

Fred Woodman, superintendent of SAD 67 (Lincoln area), didn’t mince words. The reforms will cause more children to fall through the cracks, he said.

“Somewhere in here they forgot about kids. Does it say what to do with the average kid who needs time to get through school?” said Woodman.

He worried that a student who doesn’t pass the local assessment and receive a diploma simply will drop out.

While the current system holds the risk that a student is simply passed along from grade to grade, at least he or she will graduate and, it is hoped, blossom later, said Woodman.

The stipulation that students must study the five main content areas of the Learning Results – English, math, science-technology, social studies and health-physical education – each year of high school also concerned superintendents.

Students won’t have enough time for electives, for specializing in a certain subject or for vocational courses, they said.

The Department of Education is moving too fast, according to Superintendent Rick Lyons of SAD 22 (Hampden area).

Lyons said neither the state nor the local school districts have the personnel to carry out the new stipulations, and that he is particularly worried about the costs associated with implementing many of the measures, particularly in light of the state’s budget problems. He said he also is bothered by what he sees as a “concerted effort to move education to the control of the state.”

“We need to slow down, have incremental benchmarks, fund the benchmarks, assess them and move along [gradually],” Lyons said.

He said many of his counterparts voiced similar concerns Friday when the executive committee of the Maine School Superintendents Association met with Deputy Commissioner Lucarelli. The group likely will issue a position paper next week, said Lyons, who is president.

Meanwhile, Lucarelli said the feedback she has received so far indicates that her department needs to clarify some things.

“It’s not our intent for people to send in their curricula to have it approved,” she said. “If the wording suggests it, we’ll get it changed. It’s our intent for the commissioner to have less direct involvement. We’ll only do oversight when there’s a problem.”

Also, the department doesn’t expect students to take courses in the five Learning Result content areas for the entire school day for four years, but to study elements of those areas each year in their classes, Lucarelli said.

The state’s hands may be tied, however, when it comes to requiring school districts to implement a local assessment by 2003-2004, she said.

With Congress debating whether students should be tested annually in reading, writing and math, the department is trying to make a case that Maine be exempt from an annual federal test because it has a reliable local assessment.

“If we get Congress to say OK, we have to have assessment systems in place,” she said.

The rights of the local school districts are still intact with the new rules, according to Department of Education spokesman Yellow Light Breen. The curriculum design, the choice of materials and the assessment system all must be decided at the local level, he pointed out.

The cost may not be as high as some people think, Breen said.

“A lot of what’s in the Learning Results is the same core content that schools are teaching now,” he said.

Also, the department recognizes that developing an assessment could be a burden for schools, and plans to come up with models and templates of assessments that could save schools some work.

The proposed rules are the next step in the process of moving toward the Learning Results, which the Legislature passed in 1997.

The Maine Educational Assessment, the state’s standardized testing program, was revised in 1998 to reflect the Learning Results.

And with the newly revised rules, some of which take effect next year, the curriculum will begin to match up, Breen said.

A hearing on some of the rules will be held from 1 to 5 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 19, in Room 103 at the State Office Building in Augusta and at distance learning sites at the Bangor Public Library and at Gorham and Presque Isle high schools. Written comments will be accepted by 5 p.m. Jan. 4, 2002.

Not everyone is taking issue with the revised rules. Sandra Bernstein, superintendent in SAD 27 (Fort Kent area), said she likes that the focus is on student performance instead of counting credits.

Decrying a lack of funding “isn’t where we should be applying our energy,” she said. “We need to be more creative and get outside the box and figure out how to get things done for kids in ways that don’t fit with our traditional view.”