Given the suggestion behind a bill to review (that is, change) the way schools currently are governed, recent testimony from the Maine School Boards Association was remarkably restrained. Restrained, but also useful to the Legislature’s Education Committee, which is considering LD 1403.

The bill, a resolve, would create a task force to review school governance as it exists under the school boards, superintendents, principals and teachers. It would further hold as a model a study by the Maine Coalition for Excellence in Education, the group pushing the legislation. A thorough review of school governance in light of changes through Maine’s Learning Results may not be a terrible idea, but if the task force is going to judge the effectiveness of school boards, superintendents, principals and teachers it might be better if it included at least one school-board member. Or one superintendent. Or one principal. Or even one overworked teacher. Unfortunately, the bill doesn’t specify that any of the people who would be directly involved in the potential changes should serve on the task force, although they are not specifically excluded from it.

So it was no surprise that the first good idea from the School Board Association president, Phyllis Shubert, would be that task force members have some actual experience with the issue the task force would review. The second one is that the bill get rid of the directive to use the coalition’s study as a model for change and also to drop as a model the old Rosser report, which was found to have various shortcomings when it was released six years ago. Mrs. Shubert objected to them both because “neither is based in evidence of improved academic performance.” Considering the number of studies available for models of school governance, there is little reason to decide that these two would be particularly emphasized.

What this leaves the Legislature’s Education Committee is a task force to address questions about turnover in superintendent positions and ways school boards can stay focused on big-picture questions rather than being embroiled in, say, debates over the quality of officiating at basketball games. Whether this merits a separate task force for study is up to members of the Education Committee. Maybe they could get the opinion of some of those principals and teachers they’re going to include in the amendments to LD 1403.