MEETING THE TESTS

Learning Results, Maine’s system to raise academic standards, was first debated before today’s high school seniors were in kindergarten. It is not required to be even partly in place until many of them will have finished college. Education groups asking legislators for more time this week can make the reasonable case that funding has not been and will not be adequate for all schools to meet all of the higher standards. But that doesn’t mean the deadlines have to be moved again.

Districts are expected to have initial assessments in five of eight study areas in place by the 2003-04 school year and graduation assessments ready by 2007. The five are English, math, social studies, science and technology and health. The other three – visual and performing arts, foreign language and career planning – are to be in place by 2010, just two years before the new federal assessment requirements for these areas are scheduled

to take effect.

Commissioner Duke Albanese has offered a compromise timetable that would require only English and math be in place for graduation in 2007, with social studies, science and health in 2008. The large majority of districts have had the resources to meet this deadline. Local boards can give their schools time to adopt the new system by setting the expected level of proficiency to account for inevitable glitches in their methods of assessment – tests, portfolios, writing projects, etc. – that will need to be worked out. School boards should be able to raise the proficiency levels as students and teachers become more accustomed to the new system.

Most Maine schools already meet most of the system’s standards. Their work centers on teachers reviewing all of their expectations in their fields, identifying what they do to teach the specific content and how they know their students have learned it. It is an extensive and time-consuming exercise but necessary to ensure that students will not find themselves juniors or seniors in high school and missing the opportunity to acquire essential areas of their educations. The Department of Education currently is conducting a survey of effective assessment systems already in Maine schools, which will be used to provide other schools with methods for their own use. It might be helpful to both the teachers doing the paperwork and administrators trying to figure out how all of these assessments work together to speed up that survey and get the results out quickly.

One of the groups’ arguments is that the Learning Results should be delayed until the proposed Essential Programs and Services funding model is in place, improving the chances that sufficient money will be available to schools. That makes for a good bargaining position: No new funding, no new standards, but it doesn’t fully account for the Learning Results itself contains a lesser chip – the final three standards aren’t required unless the new funding model is fully in place – or the amount of funding already available.

Based on the per-pupil guarantee in the state education funding formula, schools receive at least 80 percent of what is needed to meet tough standards under Learning Results in the eight areas. Meeting two of those standards in 2007 and three more in 2008 requires school boards and administrators to budget with a good deal of ingenuity. But the assessments must begin sometime – especially now with the federal standards – and more delay won’t help Maine students.