Still time for compromise on education reform

It is said that the sign of a good compromise is that all the parties involved have something about the final product that they dislike. The fact that the Education Committee’s alternative to Gov. Baldacci’s school district consolidation plan has been roundly criticized, however, should not be taken as a sign that it is a good compromise. It is not.

While the governor’s own assessment of the committee’s proposal, that it is too little, too late, is the correct one, his own plan is flawed as well. There still remains, therefore, room in the middle for a compromise that really will generate administrative savings while improving the educational product Maine schools provide.

The primary flaw that the committee’s plan shares with the governor’s is its ceaseless focus not on the quality or efficiency of Maine’s school districts, but on their size. In both plans, the ultimate goal is to simply increase the size of districts, despite a good deal of research from across the nation showing that larger districts can often be less efficient than smaller ones.

According to the Education Department’s own data, size is a far from ideal indicator of administrative efficiency. Fully half the state’s 10 largest school districts dedicate a higher percentage of their total spending to school administration than the state average. Belfast-area SAD 34 spends a smaller percentage of its education dollar on school system administration than six of the top 10 largest districts in the state, despite having more than a thousand fewer students than any of them. My own district, Camden-based SAD 28, with 850 students, devotes 4.39 percent of total spending to school administration, less than all but two of the state’s 10 largest districts.

Under both consolidation proposals, though, efficient and inefficient districts would be merged together. The governor’s plan, for instance, would replace the Bangor area’s many school units with one enormous district serving 15,000 students. In so doing, it would merge efficient Bangor and Old Town, both of which dedicate less than 3 percent of total spending on system administration, with inefficient Brewer and Orono, which both spend almost 6 percent. Hermon spends more than twice as much on system administration, on a percentage basis, than Orrington, which has a third fewer students.

Rather than simply merge districts like these in the hope that savings will result, the focus needs to be on generating efficiency within and between those districts while maintaining quality educational programs.

How to do it?

. Use Education Service Districts. In January, I authored a report for the Maine Heritage Policy Center that laid out a consolidation alternative using these collaborative bodies, which have been proven in countless other states to cut costs and improve the quality of educational services available to schools. Several ESDs already operate in Maine, and as envisioned in the MHPC report, each Maine school district would join one, allowing them to share resources and cut duplication of effort. The state could set benchmarks for administrative savings, and allow the local districts to collaborate on services where it makes sense for them to do so. Savings would be generated, services improved, and local community and parental involvement preserved.

. Improve accountability. It is unlikely that the people of Brewer realize that they spend a hundred dollars more per student than the state average on school system administration, twice as much as neighboring Bangor, but that is precisely the kind of information that should be made more readily available to voters at school budget time. Furthermore, the state should adopt a proposal first put forward by former gubernatorial candidate Barbara Merrill, who suggested that local districts be made to pay 100 percent of the costs of school and system administration. In this way, school officials are held accountable to local taxpayers for their administrative spending, and collaboration with other districts is encouraged.

. Cut the administrative workload. In defense of the local school districts, the state is hardly without sin as far as school administrative costs are concerned. Indeed, it is likely that the vast majority of increases in administrative spending by school districts over the past few years can be laid directly at the feet of the state and federal governments, which seem never to tire of inventing new ways to generate paperwork for school personnel. The state-imposed Local Assessment System, for instance, which was unceremoniously scrapped earlier this winter, was a shining model of bureaucratic excess, requiring countless hours of work by virtually every teacher and administrator in the state. No reform plan aimed at cutting school administrative costs can be considered complete unless a substantive effort is made to identify and more effectively manage the administrative burden placed on Maine’s schools by state government.

The Education Committee’s work is not without merit. Its suggestion that districts use a common budget format, to more readily facilitate comparisons between districts, is a smart one. A more aggressive, proven approach to generating savings is needed, though, as well as a significant effort to bring accountability to both state and local education officials.

The Appropriations Committee, which now controls the fate of the consolidation plan, should seize the opportunity before it, and find just such a compromise.

Stephen L. Bowen is a teacher with MSAD 28, a former state legislator, and an adjunct scholar at The Maine Heritage Policy Center. The author can be reached at sbowen@mainepolicy.org