Time to get a school choice organization going!

[Stephen Bowen]

With the amount of coverage in the papers this past week, it is clear that the message is getting out there that school choice is under threat. The trick is to get choice supporters informed, organized, and taking action to save choice.

There are two examples of some early success out there that I know of.

In the Etna/Dixmont area, a small group of choice supporters has gotten itself organized, got a piece published in the Bangor Daily News, and seems to have been done a good job putting the brakes on attempts in that area to eliminate choice.

In Raymond, another group of supporters was able to intimidate the school board into backing away from a vote to eliminate choice there that the board planned to take Wednesday.

With at least two groups organized and showing signs of success, we have at two models in place that show how, community by community, attempts to eliminate choice can be rolled back.

Can we get a statewide organization underway as well?

[Brian Walker]

It seems that the key to success in retaining school choice is using data-driven arguments to counter a great deal of misinformation that is circulating. The Friedman Foundation study that Steve refers to in his report is an example of such data. Do people know of other studies that could be beneficial to circulate?

[SAD38 Choice Advocates]

Here's some data, though I'm not sure what kind of an argument can be made of it. The State provides estimates of the penalties to districts that choose not to consolidate. See http://www.maine.gov/education/reorg/penalties.html, and there's also a spreadsheet to back it up. It appears that they are cooking the books to enhance the penalties. There is a $105 penalty for each student. Naturally, the total penalty depends on the number of students, and the number of students is given under the "weighted average pupils" column. Statisticians and economists normally use a weighted average to enhance the accuracy of volatile observations. Total up all of these weighted average pupil numbers, and you'll find that they assume that there will be 217,295 students when the penalties are assigned -- at least that's the number shown as the total on their spreadsheet. In contrast, there were only 193,335 actual students in 2006-7. If the weighted average was used in a legitimate way (to enhance accuracy), then the two totals would be quite close. It appears that their weighting scheme amounts to nothing more than increasing everyone's penalty by 10 or 15 percent.

[Stephen Bowen]

Just some clarification on this. The DOE tells me that the use of the weighted student count in this instance is NOT intended to inflate penalties, but was necessary because of the complexity of the EPS formula. As I understand it from them, when they were trying to calculate penalties for non-compliance and started backing out the administrative money on which the penalty is based, it had the effect of lowering the other per-pupil amounts in EPS, which are used to calculate allocations for such things as limited-English students and so forth. They needed a way to add back in those amounts, then back the administrative cut out to get to an accurate penalty calculation. Apparently, the easiest way to do this mathematically was to inflate the pupil count to take into account all the weighted allocations that are built off it. The administrative penalty is then backed out, without the loss of that money driving down all the other weighted allocations that are tied to it.

In any event, DOE wants to be sure folks understand that they are not "cooking the books," they simply had what amounts to a math problem that needed to be resolved to get an accurate count. The EPS system is so complex, and contains so many variables, that cutting one fiscal element has an impact in a dozen other places. The use of the weighted count was their fix for it.

Hope this makes things clearer. If not, someone who is better at math than me may want to call the Department and have them walk through it.

[Dan Conte]

This seems pretty complicated, and we could spend a lot of time and energy (and money) figuring it out; but it all comes down to obeying a command sent down from on high. If local districts think they can save money by consolidating or cooperating somehow, they should should be free to do that. The state, however, out of the blue, is demanding that school districts relinquish their control over how they educate students. I think we should all just tell them to go scratch.

[SAD38 Choice Advocates]

Here are a couple more items.

http://www.mainechildrensalliance.org/am/reg_publish/caseforcoopera... is a report put out by the Maine Children's Alliance. It's gotten a fair amount of press recently. Among the report's conclusions is the statement that we should "Support designation of magnet schools with diverse curriculums" (p. 40); at another point, it states "...magnet high schools, so successful in many major cities, could also be attempted in Maine. Emphasizing math and science, the arts, foreign languages and literature have made school choice an important contribution to educational excellence elsewhere." (p. 36). Among the "collaborators" on this paper are Leo G. Martin, a former Commissioner and James Rier, of the MDOE.

Another item is at http://www.umaine.edu/edhd/research/pubs/penquisfinalrpt.pdf, and was put out by the Center for Research and Evaluation at the University of Maine. It's more of a study of the consolidation process as a whole, and what's working and not working, and has less to do with choice. It's longer and denser (more than 100 pages), but good background reading.

[Elizabeth Johnson]

Looking for data to determine the effectiveness of school choice programs requires that we look beyond the state of Maine and beyond the National Education Association. We need to consider data which measures experiences already tested. The State of Maine has just started the conversation and hasn't figured it out yet. The NEA is a political powerhouse with a vested interest in maintaining its own status quo. Take a look at some of the below resources to learn more about what is being done and how effective it has been:

http://www.edreform.com/index.cfm?fuseAction=section&pSectionID...

http://www.uscharterschools.org/cs/r/query/q/1558?x-title=New+Non-F...

http://www.kipp.org/?gclid=CIOq2P6F85MCFQslHgod2GAfWg

[SAD38 Choice Advocates]

Here's another item. The title is "Where Do Public School Teachers Send Their Kids to School?" See http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=15818 for an executive summary and a link to the entire article. The primary observation made is that public school teachers are more likely than the general public to send their kids to a private school.

[Brian Walker]

One other comment: The area of special education and how it is handled will be an important factor in the Raymond decision. While I know that there are a lot of open questions, does anyone have information about how state reimbursement for special education in a town with choice differs from that from a town or RSU without choice?

[Stephen Bowen]

Here is some of what I learned from talking with DOE about special ed. Back in the days when the state's school funding formula was spending-driven, when the districts sent data on their spending to the state and the state paid some share of it, nobody seems to have paid much attention to special education spending with regard to tuitioning. The town that "received" the tuitioned special ed student included the spending on that student in with the spending of the other special ed students they had and got state reimbursement for some percent of that spending.

Essential Programs and Services, the new funding system, is cost-based, not spending-based. The money you get from the state is based on what it should cost you to educate the students you have, not what you are spending, whether too much or two little. EPS uses this extraordinarily complicated formula to decide all this and districts then get an EPS allocation from the state for what EPS says it should cost them to educate all their kids.

Under EPS, the special ed money goes to the district where the student resides, not, in the case of tuitioning, to the district to which the student is tuitioned. The EPS allocation for the special ed services for a 10th grader from Raymond, for instance, goes to Raymond, not to the district to which the student is tuitioned. In Raymond's case, they have a contract with Windham to provide special education services to Raymond's special ed students. Raymond then pays Windham for those costs from its EPS allocation. This practice is used elsewhere, though the specifics vary from place to place, as we have learned is the case with regard to choice itself.

Even so, it is hard to see how having choice in this instance costs Raymond more with regard to special ed services. They have a special education allocation under EPS, which is what it is no matter who provides the special ed services. If a special ed student from Raymond decided to go to Poland, one assumes the special education allocation for that student would follow him to Poland. Windham would incur no costs for that student, would thus lose nothing were that student to go elsewhere. Raymond's costs are the same either way.

The same would hold true after the formation of a Raymond-Windham RSU. The special ed costs would be what they would be whether the special education student remained in the RSU for services or went elsewhere. The money would follow the student.

Part of what needs to be done here is a reworking of the how tuition amounts are calculated, which is currently based on average per-pupil spending the previous year, the maximum amount allowed by law, or some other amount negotiated between the two parties and established in a contract. These costs have no relation to what it should cost to educate these kids. Raymond sends 26 high school kids to Poland. The tuition rate Poland charges is the state maximum, $8039 per-pupil, because Poland's average per-pupil spending the year before was above that, $8945. EPS, though, says Poland should be at about $6850, which is closer to what Raymond should be paying if EPS is to be believed. Even Windham's lower rate, $7437, is a good deal for Windham, EPS says they should be able to spend $7143 per student.

What needs to be developed is an EPS-based tuition rate that would include special ed costs. That would have the effect of keeping costs down, while providing more incentive for schools to accept tuitioned special ed kids.

DOE, I think, is only now beginning to realize what a mess tuitioning is. I suspect that they would be interested in looking at a new way to handle the issue. If we can develop an EPS-based tuition model that is friendly to school choice, there is a chance they may jump on it.

[Joshua Dwyer]

Hi Everyone:

I'm currently going to public policy school in Chicago, but I am also working for a school choice organization started out here called School Choice Illinois. I'm originally from Maine, went to school at Glenburn Elementary School and graduated from John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor (I was a beneficiary of the great town-tuitioning system that now seems to be under threat). I'm very interested in the issue and think that now (with the frustration felt by many parents about consolidation) is a great time to introduce the idea of expanding educational opportunities for their children to them. Feel free to email me at [e-mail].