NEW SCHOOL CHOICE

A report by the Maine Children’s Alliance takes school information that many others have examined and finds new opportunity for school districts to work together to improve the quality and variety of education without costing taxpayers more. The work, called “A Case for Cooperation,” complements another recent study on the issue and should find support in Augusta.

The challenge facing Maine, roughly, is this: Maine students score reasonably well on national exams but have not improved in a decade while the rest of the nation, as a whole, has. During that time, the state has built one of the most expensive K-12 systems in the country, heavy on administration but increasingly short on students, and school populations are expected to keep falling. Maine taxpayers have made it clear they do not want to pay more for public services, with many wanting to pay considerably less.

“A Case for Cooperation” is an invi-tation to measured reform and is an ounce of prevention against steep cuts that could come as a result of tax revolt. It calls for regional cooperation through planning councils, perhaps based on the 26 existing vocational districts, that would look for ways for multiple districts to become more efficient and provide students with more courses at the same time. It offers the logical step of aligning school calendars to make cooperation easier and calls for a badly needed overhaul of the state’s school-construction rules.

The report will look familiar to educators who have seen the recent Select Panel on Revisioning Education report to the State Board of Education and it is telling that the two separate reports reached similar conclusions, but in many ways the former supports the latter by providing a means – voluntary regional education groups working together – to the ends envisioned by the panel.

Those include expanding the school year by 10 days and including half-day pre-school; providing tuition money for post-secondary education; improving teacher pay and raising class sizes to the national average.

Maine, especially through the Leg-islature, has grown accustomed to killing any reform that asks it to change its traditional school districts, no matter the higher per-pupil costs of building small schools or the added cost of administration. Bigger schools aren’t necessarily better and very large schools can cost more per pupil than smaller ones, but there are clear areas that Maine can target without widespread closing of schools or laying off teachers that would slowly bring secondary schools here more in line with what its taxpayers can afford.

The underlying argument within “A Case for Cooperation” is that, “Despite … powerful pressures, forced consolidation, whether mandated by the State Board of Education or the Legislature, will face fierce resistance.” But by presenting the facts of the soon-to-arrive unsustainable conditions and, certainly, by providing a healthy mix of incentives, educators and taxpayers will see the benefits in the kinds of choices proposed both in this report and in the select panel’s work.

Maine cherishes its tradition of local control but the cost of that tradition and the lack of progress under the current system is forcing change. The question is whether it will choose reform of its liking before reform driven by savings is imposed upon it.