School unions: correlation doesn’t mean causation

Consider this: In Maine, on average, snow removal in districts represented by Republicans costs twice as much per passenger-mile than it does in districts represented by Democrats. Ergo, one may infer:

. Republicans are incorrigible spendthrifts.

. Suffering from an unreasonable aversion to snow, Republicans clear twice as many roads as necessary.

. Rural public works budgets could be reduced by 50 percent if every Republican in office were replaced with a Democrat.

If you are compelled by such conclusions, here’s good news: you may be qualified to be a senior policy analyst at the Maine Department of Education where, in the service of propping up yet another failing reform policy, similar statistics are now so regularly bent into perverse ends that the squeal of illogic has become ordinary background noise.

In a protracted offensive last week to get certain senators to reconsider their votes broadening the options for school reorganization, the latest semi-baked pretzel to shoot out of the department’s bazooka was a one-pager purporting that above-average local school costs result from a particular governance structure.

With dazzling four-digit precision, the Department of Education claims that local oversight in districts where municipalities cooperate as school unions costs $1,385 more per student than governance in a consolidated district.

In a regionalized system of 1,500 students, like School Union 98 on Mount Desert Island, that figure projects the expense of local control into an annual superfluity of more than $2 million – a potential savings that should make those on both sides of the tug of war salivate.

So how, exactly, would one go about realizing that savings?

Channeling corporate downsizing hatchet man “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap, let us start by pink-slipping every elected school board member from the four MDI towns. That’s 20 board members with stipends of $300 each per year. $6,000 saved; $1,994,000 to go.

Then, to replace all those laid-off union board members, we’ll hire 20 fresh regional board members at, say, $300 per year and…

Well, never mind that. Apparently it’s the redundancy of local budgeting and municipal review that causes unnecessary expense in unions. So we’ll dismiss the town warrant committees, select boards and the bodies of town meetings, each of which scrutinize the local school budgets every year. And that subtracts…

Well, actually that oversight doesn’t cost the school budget anything currently, as those are exclusively municipal functions. But perhaps our dedicated warrant committee members could be hired on to review the new regional budget later in the evenings after they’ve finished up with town business.

School administrators, that’s the ticket! Dismiss Union 98’s superintendent, business manager, curriculum coordinator, special education director and central office staff and replace them all with regionalized substitutes for a net savings of … well, nothing.

The absurdity here results from the fact that school unions are already in fact vehicles for municipal school units to administer efficiently. Any assertion that a union of municipal districts is generically less efficient than an independent municipal system is a simple, first-order categorical error.

So, if not governance, what is the cause of the high per-pupil costs in some school unions?

This has been studied in some detail by the Department of Education’s own consultant, David Silvernail. After combing and cross-combing the data, on Jan. 8 Silvernail reported to the state Legislature’s Education Committee that no clear conclusion could be drawn relating school governance to cost.

Silvernail, however, reported that one distinct attribute did correlate closely to per-pupil school expense.

Independent of school governance structure, Silvernail said the most consistent predictor of relative per-pupil costs was local valuation. Wealthy towns tend to spend more for local education than less wealthy towns.

So, again, what drives higher educational costs?

It’s not the structure of governance, because the full range of per-pupil costs are represented across unions, SADs, and single municipal districts in all their real-world combinations.

The unit costs of education turn out to depend primarily upon school programming which, itself, depends upon local policy and resources. Some communities commit to teaching foreign languages, art and music in elementary schools. Some don’t. Some pay their teachers more to offset higher local costs of living. Some communities have lower student-teacher ratios out of choice and some rural areas have lower ratios out of necessity.

And there you have it.

If you need to cut snow removal costs, you clear fewer miles of road and issue snowshoes.

If you want to shrink school costs by 20 percent, you cut programming, lay off staff and close schools in little towns.

Misrepresenting numbers to show that such savings can be accomplished only by changing governance is just another snow job. So the next time the department shoots you such a pastry, take it with some mustard.

Brian Hubbell is a member of the Bar Harbor school board, vice-chair of the MDI reorganization planning committee, and administrator of MDIschools.net.