Response to Rep. Steve Lovejoy

Apologies to Steve Lovejoy, State Representative for District 115 in Portland, for taking more than a week to respond. He wrote in response to the first of three entries I posted last week about what a LePage administration might mean for school reform.

His questions are the VERY questions the legislature is going to have to wrestle with. They required some time (and as you’ll see, some length) to address, time that disappeared during what became a very busy and exciting week for Maine Enterprise Schools. In each case, I've tried to link the theoretical to an actual Maine example. Rep. Lovejoy's word in italics.

While I appreciate your email, and still like the idea of charter schools, I have a real problem with how we can make it work. I'll look forward to the next three pieces. In terms of how to make that work, I would like to see you address several issues that concern me.

With ever shrinking enrollments in many areas of Maine, especially Northern Maine, will charter schools make the public schools even smaller and less financially feasible. Will it drive further school closures and consolidation? Will the shifting of funds make this inevitable?

Given that the current promoters say give it five year and if it doesn't work the charters will close, what schools will the students go back to if we have had to close more schools?

Should we require that charter schools take a truly representative population that gives it the same demographics as the public schools they draw from? Should it include special education? If not, aren't we creating an unequal field in terms of comparisons of the results of the schools?

The first question itself, "with ever shrinking enrollments in many areas of Maine, especially Northern Maine, will charter schools make the public schools even smaller and less financially feasible?" highlights a myth/misunderstanding that is at the core of Maine's inability to innovate. While the consolidation initiative in Maine largely accepted this as gospel, and while lots of folks, like the Maine Education Association, repeat this over and over, "making the public schools smaller" and "less financially feasible” are NOT cause and effect links.

This myth, like many myths, has the power and effect of fact, especially when it is built into law: the EPS formula, Maine's school construction formula, and our teacher certification requirements, to name just a few, all embed assumptions that put pressure on smaller schools. This is particularly cruel to those rural areas or towns, like Lubec, that hold on to (or are held to) that myth for too long. The young people whose schools close because of these false, (but policy-embedded, therefore functionally true) assumptions do NOT automatically get a better education. They just drive (or are bussed) farther to get it.

Instead of asking, "how can we keep all our current schools open largely as they are?" we need to ask, "are the schools we have the schools we need?" For some of our students, they are. But a system of sustainable small schools serving Maine's mostly small towns and rural areas well - one that can also serve urban and suburban areas well - is within our reach. Such a system can enable every child access to quality, fully public schools - some doing what small schools do well, others doing what large schools do well. Once we change the metric from "efficient" to "productive," we can allocate resources in ways that MUCH more reliably produce the kind of young people we hope to - and do so at a significant savings to taxpayers.

Schools we have, schools we need...

As Rep. Lovejoy points out, the public schools ARE getting smaller. That is a function of population trends, each of which are linked to demographic, economic, cultural and other trends - and all of which, at least now, fuel Maine's brain drain. In some communities, dissatisfaction or conflict with local public schools plays in as well. Folks who can afford private school take their kids out of public schools. Parents band together in home-schooling cooperatives. Essentially, these are people who, when faced with the current options, decide to go outside the system. What if we were to create fully public schools that enticed them back to the system - or never caused them to leave in the first place?

While perhaps originally intended as a step in that direction, Maine's much-compromised consolidation bill did the opposite of what it set out to do. Something of Frankenstein monster (Mel Brooks version) by the time addenda, exceptions, superintendent's poison pills and whatever else could be bolted or stitched on was, the initiative had the effect of souring almost everyone in Maine toward the whole idea. The proof is in the pudding: a few larger districts, but still far too many superintendents, district administrators, and state-level bureaucrats. The vast savings such a drastic change could have produced would have freed that money to be directly invested in teachers and innovation - or, given the economic downturn, given more of a cushion as Maine's superintendents cut budgets even further and further to the bone, and the 55% EPS target seems more and more...umm...aspirational.

The upshot: Maine’s schools and districts are in a death struggle with each other to hold on to as many bodies as possible. They try to do more of the same with a smaller and smaller per-student allocation from the state - more AP classes, or International Baccalaureate, or a $28 million dollar, 750-student warehouse to house all of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders in Brunswick (at a time when the base closing shrunk enrollment significantly). These "more of the same" approaches are successful in some cases, usually for short periods, in raising achievement and expectations.

But we know that only works for some kids. And we wish we could do something about it. But the fact is that we can't invest money, time, or energy in the innovations that could meet the needs of more kids when we're trying to squeeze even more out of what we have.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Currently, let's say you're a superintendent in Maine and another superintendent comes to you and says, "I'd like to offer 5 or 10 slots in my school, which does X really well, to students in your district who are not thriving." In the old regime, you might work out an agreement, in some cases, with money following, in other cases not. But now, it's even more important than before to count that kid on YOUR rolls, so that the state aid - depending on the community, 5 or 10 kids can be $25,000 to $100,000 - continues to flow. The search for dollar based efficiency, rather than results-based productivity, causes districts to keep larger than necessary schools open with fewer and fewer students to serve.

It also makes ANY productive discussion of new PUBLIC schools almost impossible, because any new school - small or large - would "take money from the existing schools." Yes, it would. (Unless, as to some extent with Poland Regional HS, and to a lesser extent at Casco Bay HS, the two public school start-ups in Maine over the past 10 years, the "existing schools," communities, school committees and other stakeholders were to become active enthusiastic players in the reinvention of schools. Such new schools would not be "taking from" but collaborating, in the service of kids, with the existing local business, non-profits, and social service systems.

This is especially important because we KNOW quality smaller schools at the middle and high school level have a much better track record with learners who do not find early success in traditional elementary schools - especially in terms of results that beat predictive socioeconomic data curves. The work of the Gates Foundation has helped make clear that there ARE best practices that can flourish in spite of obstacles, often honed through a replication network of like-minded schools ((KIPP, Green Dot, Big Picture Co., Expeditionary Learning).

We also know that communities that hold on to their schools (or, should charter laws come into effect, start successful new public schools) can hold and attract families. We know that towns that lose schools lose a vital community connector. Despite that, the assumption that guides such conversation is not what happens in the schools, or what happens with young people, or what allocation of resources will result in the best possible result for the most people.

It's much more, in fact, about what we can't do - including last week a fairly high level state education dept. employee uttering my favorite words: "I know we should (be able to certify Maine Enterprise Schools for some very particular designation) but we can't." Very next sentence: "Of course, what you're doing is more what the statute intends, but the language clearly says..."

How have we gotten to a place where the folks who control where the money goes are saying, "we can't send it where we think it would most effectively achieve our mission?" In part, that's because school finance is arcane, daunting to all but the most wonk-y, and rife with head-shaking provisions, exceptions and local customs - like at least one town in Maine, where a line item in the town/school budget that would enable a particular child to attend a particular school is voted on by hand by residents at town meeting.

Rep. Lovejoy knows how challenging it will be to craft solutions that work in Maine's VASTLY different southern and northern/western regions; for islands and for "inland islands" like Greenville, which qualify for island exemptions in the EPS formula; and for the city he represents, Portland, which is always at one extreme or another of any revision to "high receiver/low receiver" formulas.

The only way we can get some semblance of equity in crafting the allocation of resources is through legislative action that sets the parameters. I'll make recommendations for those parameters after I address the second cluster of Rep. Lovejoy's questions:

Given that the current promoters say give it five year and if it doesn't work the charters will close, what schools will the students go back to if we have had to close more schools?

My answers tomorrow, in the form of An idiosyncratic examination of Maine's idiosyncratic school choice landscape. Sometime over Thanksgiving weekend, check back for a set of policy recommendations in answer to Rep. Lovejoy's last cluster of questions:

Should we require that charter schools take a truly representative population that gives it the same demographics as the public schools they draw from? Should it include special education? If not, aren't we creating an unequal field in terms of comparisons of the results of the schools?