[Local-Maine-Schools] Response to an avid supporter of consolidation

[Dick Atlee]

This is a response I sent to a high state official (not elected) with 
home several of us have had correspondence.  It makes several points I'd 
like to share, but since I have not asked for permission to publish it, 
I've removed identifying information.  I started by apologizing for 
having jumped to several conclusions about him...

-------- Original Message --------

... The bill does in fact pose a serious threat to the stability of our
local education system -- quite analogous to Jugoslavia -- with 40 years
of process invested in bringing people together in a cohesive role, now
one budget-item away from  a system that will pit them against each
other.  So it is all too easy to fall into anger, for which I apologize.
Comments below.

xxxxxxxxx wrote:
[I had spoken of most teachers as committed to the educational welfare 
of their students, experiencing an intensity each day that neither he 
nor I might be able to stand up under, rather than as the "special 
interests" some people have asserted]

> I agree with everything you say about teachers, I think.  I have talked 
> with a large number of teachers and they do not have any opposition to 
> consolidation--indeed, several have said that there are significant 
> positives that might come in professional development!

How do you suppose the teachers to whom you spoke educated themselves on
the bill that just came out last Wednesday and took us long hours of
work to begin to comprehend?  All the teachers I have heard from since
we published our reality check on Friday (which is not a raw polemic --
it simply analyzes the contents of the actual bill) have reacted in
horror.  The teachers you spoke to are in the same situation as the
people at the beginning of the Iraq War who were gung-ho to destroy
WMD's and bring Democracy to Iraq.  They didn't have the information
they needed to realize what a crazy idea that was.  As a computer
technologist, I learned back in 1967 about garbage-on-garbage-out.  A
poorly-informed public does not operate well as a democracy.  The
misinformation that has been put out about not only this bill, but the
underlying assumption of massive admin bloat that underlies it, would
obviously bring the kind of response you say you've heard.  It is too
easy to pit teachers against "administrators" in the polarizing way that
has been done for this bill, with the MEA hot on its bandwagon whenever
a version comes out that leaves them unscathed and dead set against any
version that doesn't.

> I do believe that some superintendents and school boards want to 
> maintain their positions--that is a kind of special interest quite 
> different from any you might ascribe to me.

If that were a belief based on researched statistical data, and their
numbers were significant, I would take your comment as worth considering
on its own.  But the question we're dealing with has nothing to do with
that issue, and it becomes an ad-hominum attack on a class of people
that avoids grappling with the basic issue.  If the guy next door is a
scumbag, and when he comes to warn you your house is on fire you yell at
him that he's a scumbag, you're not addressing the issue, with
potentially serious consequences.  And on an issue this important, I
believe such an action to be a grave disservice to the democratic
process, by robbing it of information.

I'm sure you believe there has been no dissembling about this bill.  I
will give you two examples.  If they don't connect for you, we probably
have no further common ground for talking about this.

1. In the fall of 2006, prior to all this, UMaine education professor
Gordon Donaldson was doing research on Maine K-12 administrative costs.
   What he found is available at

http://sparkflashgap.net/School/PursuingAdministrativeEfficiency.pdf

Its essence (see p.2) is that while Maine is $65 over the national
average in per-pupil "administrative" costs, it is $290 BELOW the
national average in "support services."  Let us ignore the question of
whether comparing Maine (a mostly rural state) to a "national" average
(as Commissioner Gendron has insisted upon doing from the start) is the
most useful way to evaluate the situation.  The fact that Maine is not
miserable in support services implies that somehow those services are
being offered far more cheaply here than elsewhere.  One possible
explanation is that many of those services are simply being done by
"administrative" staff, which is one of a number of possible
explanations that all relate to the fact that what one state puts in one
category another state might put in another category.

There are two aspects to this.  One is that, if this function-crossover
possibility is true (and we have no data from DoE -- the kind of data we
wish it could give us -- to tell us whether this is true or not), then
firing administrative personnel will result in either losing those
services or having to rehire "non-administrative" people to perform them
(hardly the kind of savings advertised).

The other aspect, to me more insidious, is that we have NEVER been told
by DoE that Maine's "admin + support services" expenditures are $225
BELOW NATIONAL AVERAGE.  It was inconvenient data that didn't fit the
pitch (you may recall the Downing Street Memos in the Iraq War), and all
our attempts to get it included in the legislative discussions were
resisted or ignored, because the idea that there actually WERE huge
admin cost overruns had become so thoroughly ingrained as an
unquestionable assumption in the discussion EVERYWHERE you looked.  And
so we have this artificial picture of administrative fatcats by the
dozen sitting around doing nothing but wasting taxpayers money.  I'm not
accusing you of creating that picture, only of playing to it by
supporting the discussion.  (There isn't any difference between these in
my frame of reference.)

Again, I'm not saying there is NO administrative waste -- only that
there is no such waste of a magnitude that deserves the kind of
sledgehammer you and the bill's proponents are about to try to slam the
state with.

2. In the discussion of declining enrollments the DOE committed the
standard "lying with statistics" trick well known to anyone familiar
with the visual analysis of data -- the falsely-placed "zero" line.  I
have spent a lot of time working with economic data to make it visually
and accurately accessible, but I won't be the one to make this case here
-- I'll let physics prof Ralph Chapman make it in a letter he sent to
Todd Benoit (attached).

The misleads described above are only two elements -- serious and
effective ones in their now-proven capacity to completely warp public
perceptions of the problem -- of a remarkable campaign of
disinformation.  That there is even the *possibility* that there is no
real massive problem with admin costs at this late stage in the game is,
in my book, unforgivable for supposedly responsible public servants.

I've watched this unfurl on the national stage over the past four years,
complete with ad-hominum attacks on dissenters, and I've been watching
the same pattern unfurl on the Maine stage for the past four months.
Believe me, it is extremely disheartening, but, like Iraq, not as
disheartening as the havoc you will have unleashed...