Steve Lovejoy

In the car today I happened to catch part of Governor Lepage’s speech at the Cumberland Club.  I listened to him talking about how they were looking at what the top 10 countries in the world are doing in education and how we can learn from them and make our system better.  While there are things to be learned, and he touched on a couple, there is a major limitation in the value of this approach!

For example, the Governor mentioned Finland as one of the leaders in education.  This is very true but there are parts of their educational system that we will have a hard time with.  First of all, only the top high school students are accepted into Education as a major.  Typically those students come from the top 10% of the high school graduating class!  In addition, teaching is considered to be a prestigious career (compare this with your image of teaching as a career) and it pays well.  Another aspect is that you have to get a master’s degree in order to teach.

So, we need to change citizen attitudes toward teaching as a career – not easily done!  We need to convince our best students that teaching is a rewarding and desirable career that they should go in to.  The top 10% of high school grads should be accepted into education, if we can only get them to apply!  If we can get past those steps we can surely get them to stay for a master’s degree in education, after all it is only another year of student loans they have to pay from the paychecks!

Lets not take on simplistic solutions to such a critical problem without truly understanding the cultural differences and what we need to change in a broader context.  After all, we all know that teaching here is a prestigious career that pays well!  Right?

There is quite a bit of talk going on around Maine about school funding.  LD 1274 was pushed through by Senate President Raye, who represents Washington County.  The focus of the bill was to take money from Southern Maine school districts and redistribute that money to more rural areas.  The overall effect of the bill’s changes were conveniently masked by projecting an additional $19 million dollars in school funding in the next annual budget.  This made it look like there was hardly any impact districts.

The truth of the matter is that there is a significant shift that was specifically designed to benefit one area of the state over another.  Washington County being one of the primary beneficiaries.  It looks like this will be mitigated for Portland because our community’s valuation has dropped twice as much as the state average.  But we are still seeing hundreds of thousands of dollars being taken from Portland and sent north and east.

I have submitted a bill for the coming session to repeal the changes under LD 1274, and to increase added funding for students in poverty across the state.  The bill submitted also required a full study of the funding formula.  Currently the formula doesn’t consider cost of living, real estate costs, and other factors that are important to Southern Maine.  While I doubt that Senator Raye will allow this to be opened up and discussed in the state house, it is an important issue that we need to move forward!

We have created all these tests and we worry about how prepared our high school graduates are.  But are we forgetting some of the more important parts of education?  Are we looking for accountability where we should be?

It is easy to say that the system is broken.  It is easy to say we have to fix it.  It isn’t so easy to come up with a plan to fix it, or should I say a plan that works?  There are new concepts and ideas being put forward all the time.  Some do make improvements, while others create more problems than they solve.  The big question always seems to come down to who is responsible.

Are high schools responsible for the quality of their graduates?  If so, are they tasked with making sure that all students coming up from the middle schools are “brought up to speed” to meet the high school standards for graduation?  What if the student entering his freshman year is only reading at a sixth grade level and has math skills at the fifth grade level?  Is the high school still responsible?

Maybe it’s the middle school that is responsible!  No, wait, they have to deal with children coming from the elementary schools who are behind where they should be!  So it must be the elementary schools!  After all, all of their students come in on an equal footing right?  Well,, no.  So it must be the parents fault!

The fact is that is a shared blame that we all have to consider!  Parents have an important role to play, as do the teachers from pre-school on up.  Do we need to go “back to the future” and redesign our schools and get teachers and parents more engaged?  I think that we do, but those people alone cannot achieve the results everyone wants.  We need everyone to step up.  Parents need to keep their kids on track and motivated.  Teachers need to constantly be trying to improve their teaching and their student’s engagement in the class room.  Schools have to insist on students meeting standards before being moved on to another level.  To move them on without being ready is to assure their failure at the next level!  Administrators have to accept the responsibility of evaluating their teachers and students, and taking action to remove teachers who aren’t up to the task.  The state has to support education and get back to a steady course rather than constantly creating new initiatives that result in an ever changing focus for teachers and administrators.