After the raucous and decidedly unfriendly hearings on school consolidation held by Governor Baldacci and Education Commissioner Sue Gendron over the past few weeks, I suspect the Governor is having second thoughts about not following the recommendations of  Brookings and the Select Panel of the State Board of Education to empower a special commission to review the situation and develop a proposal that would be subject to a one-time, no amendment, up or down vote in the Legislature.

The Special Commission could have provided a more neutral sounding board for the legions of soon-to-be-disenfranchised superintendents and district employees who have dominated the hearings to date.  Unfortunately, this preoccupation with consolidation is overshadowing other important education issues, particularly the revision and the implementation of Learning Results, our state-wide learning standards.

Let’s go back for a moment to first principles:  state and local education policy should be directed to ensuring that Maine students are the best educated in the country. Consolidation is principally about being efficient (saving money).  Being efficient is certainly an important parallel objective for a state like Maine with a heavy tax burden and many demands on its public resources, but we should not let the debate on a more efficient structure distract us from our fundamental purpose – student learning.

That is why we should be paying special attention to Commissioner Gendron’s actions last week in releasing the long-awaited report on Maine education reform by Canadian education expert Michael Fullan.  This report was in response to the Commissioner’s moratorium last year on the local assessment process as a result of the concerns of many teachers and some administrators that they were swamped by state and nationally-driven assessment demands.

Fullan’s report is balanced, almost to a fault.  On the critical question of the moratorium, for example, he says:  “Responses to the Local Assessment System (LAS) (moratorium) were varied.  Some SAU’s saw a useful pause for rethinking LAS development (“slowing the process to build capacity”)… others, however, were dismayed at a “state turnaround that allowed local dissenters to way “I told you so”.

Toward the end of his report, Fullan does suggest that the Local Assessment System has led to “many unwieldy non-comparable systems” in which the technical aspects of assessment take priority over the use of the data to improve student learning.

Fullan’s specific recommendations might be characterized as “do more of that which your best districts are now doing”:  (1) narrow the focus of improvement efforts to literacy and numeracy, (2) set concrete targets for improvement that could be tracked over time, (3) focus explicitly on teaching and learning spread through professional learning communities.  (He calls this the “de-privitatization  of teaching”, i.e. each teacher being isolated in their room.), (4) Strengthen partnerships between the Department and regional entities, (5) Develop access for all teachers to quality professional development.

This is helpful, particularly the reminders to focus on numeracy and literacy and on professional learning communities, but it is hardly revelatory.

Fullan was largely silent on another key issue facing Commissioner Gendron, the full implementation of a standards-based graduation requirement except to say that an internal DOE Task Force had reviewed this issue and the Commissioner needs to make some decisions regarding this requirement.

At her news conference last week Commissioner Gendron said she had submitted legislation, LR 958 “An Act to Prepare All Maine Students for College, Work, and Citizenship” to address the process for certifying graduation requirements and some of the Fullan report’s recommendations. The bill is in draft form. It does reaffirm a commitment to Learning Results, but is not specific as to how schools will certify consistent graduation requirements, nor is it specific as to the timetable for graduation under LR standards. These are critical issues.

The Commissioner also took the opportunity to say she will propose a repeal of Maine’s Local Assessment System and replace it with what will apparently be a simpler system of state-wide assessments. As one who supported the Local Assessment System as a (former) member of the Commissioner’s Policy Advisory Committee, I reluctantly agree with her on this difficult decision.  In spite of efforts to simplify it, the LAS was a cumbersome vehicle.  Some districts figured out ways to make it work for them, but it was simply too intimidating for many.

In retrospect, we, as a state, tried to develop a unique system that would preserve local control and still pass muster with the Federal No Child Left Behind Legislation.  It probably was simply not doable.  Fortunately, much of the work that has been done at the local level on assessment still can be used to inform teaching and learning.

So, we await the specifics of what will replace the Local Assessment System and how graduation by Learning Results will be certified. The Commissioner has a lot on her plate.