Asking the right questions...

During the Education and Cultural Affairs Committee debate around the innovation bill that was passed in May to facilitate Maine's Race to the Top application, much of the testimony - including that around enabling charter schools as an innovation strategy - repeated some fairly old arguments based on some assumptions that may longer be true. What is a public school? What kinds of public schools can serve Maine's young people, parents, and communities? How can innovation thrive without dismantling the parts of our current system that are working? If we ask the right questions, we might get closer to agreement on what kinds of policies and practices will work for Maine.


I've worked in some of the most innovative public schools in Maine over the past 16 years. Noble HS in Berwick, a school of 1200 students, reinvented itself as 3 academies while I worked there. At Freeport High School, I helped implement a genuinely high-stakes, standards-based writing requirement AND the support structures that ensured that every student would achieve that standard. At Poland Regional High School, we started a new school from scratch to serve three communities that had previously used Maine's "sending school" structures. We introduced standard-based teaching and learning in a way that raised the post-high school aspirations of our students from 35% to over 85%...by asking MORE, not less, of students. We also asked more of teachers - who wrote their own standards-based contract, for instance, that made "continuing contract" much more than a formality.

And as School Designer for Expeditionary Learning Schools, I led the process that created a third, smaller high school in Portland - one modeled on the best practices of the school reform networks funded over the past 10 years by the Gates Foundation. So to the extent innovation is possible in Maine, I've had first hand experience in much of the good work that's been done over the past two governorships.

Why, then, am I convinced that we need public charter schools (or something very much like them that does not carry the stigma of that term)?

It is quite simple - all of the energy in Maine's reform efforts have gone into top-down change strategies, largely funneled through the State Education Department and that work has NOT, 25 years after "A Nation at Risk" warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity," changed the fact that Maine's schools serve come kids very well, some kids poorly, and...sorry, but it's true...actively damages others.

That this is true is NOT the fault of hard-working teachers, administrators, and school committees. Though certainly there are some among those groups that are more part of the problem than the solution, our school systems are doing what they were designed to - educate some kids for college, some kids for trades, and, some kids for, well, whatever is left after those two. While we could go back and forth trying to diagnose and lay blame, ultimately, we all know some simple truths - that traditional classroom-based learning works for some kids (one of my daughters), and that it will NEVER work for others (one of my daughters).

We also know that while large schools that divide kids into age and subject based classes are very efficient in how they work for some kids, they are very inefficient if the goal is to graduate each child with a clear path to a productive future. Our rates of poverty, underemployment, and criminality are one indication; the brain drain that draws our young people out of Maine is another. Yet a third is what we might call a "spirit" drain...the fact that many Maine students - including many of those who want to stay in Maine and raise families here - feel like school is something to be survived, rather than something designed to help them thrive. That need not be - we can serve more kids better for the same, or less, money. We need to ask the right questions, but also let the answers lead where they lead - too often, those answers are shouted down before they have a chance to see real light of day.

Regarding charter schools, the question should not be, "Are charter schools good or bad?" We already know the answer - some are, and some aren't. The question should be, "What system (or system of systems) is most likely to produce the most benefit for the most people at the lowest cost?" If we had a clean sheet of paper and a cost-benefit analysis that takes in all of the revenue sources, all of the expenditures, and all of the opportunities lost, we would come to easy agreement that we should not keep doing what we're doing. Why, then (a tweak here and a tweak there aside) do we keep doing so?

Over the next few months, I'll highlight some of the success stories we already know about, share some of the factors behind those successes, and describe how real innovation can both meet the needs of many more learners AND enable what's working in our public schools to continue to do so. I'll also debunk the oft-repeated claim that "charters take money from public schools." To me, that's like saying that during the 80's, "Honda took money from GM." The only thing that will take money from public schools is parents who can afford choices choosing something else: private schools, home-schooling, or relocating in a way that further concentrates the economic and cultural base that supports schools in fewer and fewer communities. All of those trends bode ill for Maine's children, families and small town and rural economies.

More questions, then: Do we really want to make meaningful public school innovation impossible in Maine? In doing so, what are we protecting? What will be left when we're done protecting?