Maine’s Department of Education administered the SAT to meet federal testing requirements despite early warnings from the feds that the test, designed to predict performance rather than reflect what has been learned, would likely not be accepted. Last week, the federal agency announced Maine was not in compliance and would be fined the maximum allowed. The state has 20 days to respond, and it should do so vigorously. But it should also start developing Plan B.

Maine Education Commissioner Sue Gendron dropped the traditional Maine Education Assessment for the SAT because she said it would put more students on track to go to college. Perhaps she will be proved right, and perhaps she will be right in saying that Maine can demonstrate that the SAT meets the requirement that it align with the state Learning Results standards. But her gentlest critics – those who wanted her only to slow down so Maine would have a better sense of what was in-volved in making this switch – have already been proved right.

Now Maine is stuck. It already has a year of testing that is judged not in compliance. It has limited time to show how it might augment the SAT to make up for shortcomings; it has no clear sense of what will happen if the feds reject the state’s additional evidence.

A backup plan would take as a guide the work done on the Learning Results starting in late May of this year and edit the old MEA so that it could stand in should the state’s appeal fail. Even if it were not needed, the exercise would be valuable as a comparison between it and the SAT – it would, inexpensively, give Maine educators a sense of the gains and losses in moving to the SAT.

This conflict between the Baldacci administration’s desires and the federal Education Department has been instructive in another way too because it has shown how far No Child Left Behind, the federal act under which all of this is happening, has affected local education. And it’s not through yet.

Like many states, Maine still has compliance questions to answer for its assessment systems in grades 3 through 8. Along with math and language, an additional challenge of a science component is to be added next school year.

The Bush administration is serious about being present in local classrooms, and a state’s failure to comply with federal rules will bring financial penalties. That doesn’t mean Commissioner Gendron should back off if she continues to believe she is correct – though we have yet to see evidence that she is – but it does mean she and her department must be extraordinarily careful about reform.

Taking care means being prepared for Washington to reject Maine’s SAT switch no matter how much evidence it produces.