[Local-Maine-Schools] 3/13/2007: Gendron, Rier, and Silvernail at Appropriations

[Dick Atlee]

You know, Brian, I've been having a deja vu feeling about the ongoing 
chicanery over this issue, and it finally hit me when I read your 
excellent report on the idiotic and slavish arithmetic Dr. Nailcoffin 
pulled out here.  We've been seeing this for years with the Social 
Security fuss.

You look at the SS Trustees' chart that's plastered all over everything, 
and you see the system going bankrupt in 2042.  What you don't see is 
that they actually have 3 charts -- one based on an assumption of 6.5% 
unemployment that goes broke in 2020, one based on a 5.5% unemployment 
rate that goes broke in 2042 (the one we always see), and one based on 
the not unreasonable assumption of 4.5% unemployment that NEVER goes 
bankrupt.  But rather than looking for ways to keep unemployment down, 
which would be beneficial in endless ways, we hear screaming that SS is 
just about to become dead meat, and so people start trying to tinker 
with it (privatize, cut benefits, lengthen work lives, etc.), treating 
symptoms rather than causes.

They also overlook the fact that SS is in trouble because, as a pension 
fund, it was robbed blind by 40 years of Presidential book-cooking by 
keeping it in the main budget -- a crime that would have been punishable 
by prison for any corresponding corporate CEO.  In exactly the same way 
that the state (and its education system) have been robbed blind by a 
war that drained a billion dollars otherwise destined for Maine.  The 
REAL problem is extrinsic to the piece being looked at, whether it is SS 
financing or state education financing.

Policy makers can be incredibly myopic or downright blind when it suits 
their ideology or some other inclination.

Dick

Brian Hubbell wrote:
> Report from the Appropriation Committee's "conversation" with
> Commissioner Gendron
> Tuesday, March 13, 2007
> 
> This afternoon, at the request of the legislature's Appropriations
> Committee, Commissioner Gendron, along with Jim Rier, DOE's Policy
> Director of Management Information Systems, and Educational Policy
> professor David Silvernail, provided their perspectives on the need
> for "urgent and significant structural reform" for Maine schools.
> 
> Seamless comprehension is not always possible when trying to carry on
> a regular day job while following this sort of discussion on a little
> laptop without any of the accompanying visual aids to which those in
> the Committee room were presented.  However, I did gather a few
> interesting points.
> 
> The DOE's pitch to the Committee led off with an ominous projection.
> Jim Rier explained that if education spending continues at the rate
> the DOE projects -- from 2.8% in '07 to 3.45% in 08-09 to 3.82% in
> 10-11 the actual dollar amounts of GPA will run smack into the state
> spending caps mandated by LD-1. Hence the emergency as, at that point,
> presumably education crowds out all other state spending except for
> incarceration.
> 
> But, in the detail, it turns out that the greatest anticipated
> increases are projected to result not from excess in school governance
> but rather from a 4.3% increase in Special Ed and a significant
> increase in debt service approved by the previous legislature and a
> wave of already committed new state-funded school construction.
> 
> How those two components are to be ameliorated through consolidation
> was not part of any ensuing conversation that I heard.  But I may have
> missed something.
> 
> What displaced the general attention instead was the factoid that
> system administration costs, as reported, have not tracked the
> declines in enrollment.  This is what earns the projected arc of
> expenses the descriptor: unsustainable.
> 
> ***
> 
> At different times, several Committee members asked the Commissioner
> to speculate on what savings might be available through the
> "collaborations" recommended by the Education Committee.  But the
> DOE's position on this is that there just isn't enough information
> upon which to base such projections.  And, apparently, given this,
> their position is that by default the savings will be probably be
> "insufficient" and certainly indeterminate without a better
> understanding of the necessary "requirements" and "teeth."
> 
> ***
> 
> As an interesting contrast, the DOE appears quite content to
> speculate, and even book, savings from "consolidation," although when
> asked directly by the Committee, Dr. Silvernail said that there is
> conflicting data on whether or not consolidation elsewhere has
> produced efficiency and savings.  One thing that makes it hard to
> compare, he says, is that administrative costs elsewhere have been
> reported --well-- differently.
> 
> The savings that the DOE IS banking on are simple to explain.  Dr.
> Silvernail has studied four departments of school expenses in Maine:
> system administration, transportation, plant maintenance and
> operation, and special ed.  These he's plotted as per pupil costs and
> graphed them against district sizes.  This data shows that the lowest
> per pupil costs for these departments occurs in districts of 2500-3000
> students.
> 
> Got it?  The Appropriations Committee certainly gets it.
> 
> Then, here's the magic.  You take all the other smaller school
> districts in Maine, add up what they spend on those four departments
> and store that in the memory of your calculator.  You take those same
> districts, consolidate them into districts of 2500-3000, then multiply
> all the students in the new districts at the same per-pupil rate
> expended by the existing 2500 student districts, subtract that figure
> from the antiquated number in your calculator memory and you've saved
> $120,000,000 over three years.
> 
> Any questions?  Exigencies of real-life and fallacies of logic aside,
> arithmetically it should be simple enough for a fifth-grader to check.
>  Silvernail said he has not yet had a chance to model the structure of
> any of these new ideal districts.  But the Commissioner says she has,
> based on one, ...or two, or three... exemplary units of comparable
> size.
> 
> And the Appropriation Committee appeared to find it quite convincing,
> as near the very end Representative Flood asked the Commissioner,
> almost pleadingly, to explain why the Education Committee seemed to
> have gone so far astray and picked a minimum district size of 1200,
> when any one awake could see that 2500 was the right size for every
> district from Berwick and Portland right up through Greenville, East
> Machias, and Mattawamkeag -- well, yes, except, of course, for the
> islands.
> 
> The Commissioner, regretfully, couldn't help with that.  Even over the
> internet audio her shrug was visible.  Not being able to speak for the
> Education Committee, all she could offer was that, yes, given the
> research, 2500 /did/ seem right to the DOE as well.