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Maine Charges Aheadwith School Consolidation
Sam Smith, Progressive Review Comment: February 2007 - The assault on community controlled public education is not only a result of Bush's No Child law. Bill Kauffman once noted in Chronicles that it was liberal Harvard president President James Conant who produced a series of postwar reports calling for the "elimination of the small high school" in order to compete with the Soviets and deal with the nuclear era. Says Kauffman, "Conant the barbarian triumphed: the number of school districts plummeted from 83,718 in 1950 to 17,995 in 1970.". . .
Education is one of those human activities clearly centered on two people (teacher and student). As the system surrounding this experience becomes larger, more complex and more bureaucratic, the key players become pawns in a new and unrelated bureaucratic game. The role of the principal also dramatically shifts - from being an educational administrator to being a cross between a corporate executive and a warden. It is such a transformation that helps to bring us things like what happened at Columbine.
Consider, for a moment, that not a single private school has merged with five or ten other academies in the name of efficiency and improved learning. No one has suggested a Andover-Exeter-Groton-Milton-Choate-Kent School Administrative District.
If conglomeration of schools really helped, why would such places not give it a try? I once asked the head of one of the top private girl's schools in the country what he considered the maximum size of a school he'd like to run. His reply: 500 students. . ."Remember, that means 1,000 parents."
Particularly bizarre is what is happening in Maine. The plan itself is familiar: the pursuit of the false god of educational efficiency through the concentration of school districts as ordered by the governor. . .
What makes it stranger is that Maine is one of a handful of New England states where one can still find the remnants of American democracy functioning at human scale thanks to such institutions as town meetings and lots of small villages that do what they want without excessive interference from above. This tradition has produced in recent years more independent governors (although not the present one) than just about any state and a culture of honest independence in politics and governance that would best be emulated rather than reorganized.
And who suggested the course that the governor is following? None other than representatives of that citadel of Washington anti-democratic elitism, that hospice of prematurely aging MBAs and political science majors: the Brookings Institution. This is like Arianna Huffington coaching the Chicago Bears.
To add to the oddity, it is all being done in the name of "smart growth." The tie-in with smart growth is quite revealing. From the progressive movement of the early 20th century on, well-meaning but excessively self-assured members of the elite have controlled the debate, the money and the plans, with barely restrained contempt for the reservations, concerns and resistance of the less powerful. And so it is with smart growth.
Listen to Grow Smart Maine:
"Many of Maine's smaller cities and towns are experiencing unplanned growth but lack the resources and experience to manage that change in ways that protect the character of their community. . . The Model Town Community Project will work with a selected town during 2006 and 2007 to provide tools and advice that will help the town shape its future. The project will mobilize local, state and regional resources, enable the town to explore new growth strategies and fully engage local residents by combining the best elements of New England town meetings with ground breaking new technologies."
In other words, we'll come in and show you how to run a town meeting our way, just like we learned at business school.
But if smart growth is meant to be about environmentally sound planning, how come we have to consolidate our school districts and our town offices?
Because once you put your faith in the sort of expertise that a planning-managerial elite offers, once you turn to MBAs like others turn to Jesus, then you don't really need democracy, town meetings or small schools. What you need is efficiency and managerial skill and you have been promised that, so why worry?
In both the school consolidation and the smart growth debates the issue of human scale - and not some liberal-conservative conflict - is at the core. But we have been taught - by intellectuals, by the media, by politicians, - to revere a promise of efficiency and technological advance over the empirical advantages of living the way humans have traditionally lived, including valuing the small places that host, nurture and define their lives. We have been trained not to even notice when our very humanity is being destroyed in the name of mere physical change.
by Ann S. Kim, Portland Press Herald
After months of debate on various consolidation plans, Maine is embarking on a plan to shrink the number of school districts from 290 to about 80. The state estimates that reduced administrative costs will result in savings of $66.4 million in state and local money in the second year of the 2007-2009 budget cycle. . .
Kim Bedard, president of the Maine School Boards Association, was unhappy about the flurry of activity leading up to the budget's enactment, which she said did not allow enough time to fully analyze all the . . . Bedard, a member of the Kittery School Board, questioned how well lawmakers could have understood the plan in the short time frame. "No question, there will be unintended consequences," she said.
The plan is not mandatory, although districts that do not participate will face penalties. Those districts will lose standing in construction projects, half of their state money for administrative costs and, in some communities with high tax bases, the minimum state subsidies.
Nonparticipating districts will also see their level of state funding frozen at current levels. . . .
— Ann S. Kim and Sam Smith
Portland Press Herald and Progressive Review
2007-06-10
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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