GENDRON’S ON TARGET

Good for Education Commissioner Sue Gendron for being forthright with the difficulty of funding Maine’s ambitious Learning Results program for its schools. She properly said this week that increased state money should accompany increased state standards for Maine’s schools and that some standards would be delayed a year in the hope that funding through the state’s new Essential Programs and Services model would catch up.

Her recommendation to delay the accountability provisions recognizes that the $212 million in new money associated with EPS – were the system in place today – has yet to be found and, without that money, many schools would be shortchanged. But while the commissioner’s policy change is welcome, it does raise the question of what has changed since last spring, when the department supported the Legislature in passing the EPS funding model, which includes a provision that the state phase in and pay 50 percent of the total cost.

Learning Results was supposed to be in place now for ninth-graders for reading, writing and math. Schools also were supposed to have local assessment measures completed by the end of the school year. The commissioner’s recommendation, to be considered by the Legislature’s Education Committee this fall and the full Legislature in January, would push back the date for these until next year, when new measures were also supposed to be in place for science, social studies and physical education. The money likely won’t be available then, either – flat funding is all that is being pledged so far – which ought to make for interesting revelations 12 months from now.

Legislators have known about the funding shortfall for the seven years Learning Results has been discussed. Perhaps they encouraged the creation of the EPS model in the hope that defining the problem – a lack of funds – would make the problem go away. It didn’t, of course, and now the disparity between state expectations and state funding efforts is so evident that the commissioner has had to act. She said she was driven by an “ethical commitment” and cited Harvard professor Richard Elmore’s “Principle of Reciprocity,” which boils down to this: “If the public and policy makers want increased attention to academic quality and performance, the quid pro quo is investing in the knowledge and skill necessary to produce it. If educators want legitimacy, purpose and credibility for their work, the quid pro quo is learning to do their work differently and accepting a new model of accountability.”

More than EPS or Learning Results, this is, in essence, the idea Maine has adopted. It is a deceptively important idea that arrived more tacitly than explicitly but should be pursued further. And it is yet another reason that waiting years to substantially increase resources to school districts while talking about new ways of dividing the same old pot of money won’t cut it.