It is interesting, in these days of tight budgets and toppling fiscal dominoes, to remember that many of what for centuries have been England’s pre-eminent institutions of higher learning were originally financed by confiscation of the lands and related incomes of medieval monasteries.

“The monks,” complained Thomas Cromwell, “do not invent; they only repeat.”

Creative destruction seems not to have been the exclusive preserve of modern capitalism. Reflecting on the efforts of Cromwell and his original patron, Cardinal Wolsey, to wrestle a sclerotic culture into the preconditions for an Elizabethan revival leads to the questions, “Where are the monasteries in today’s Maine? Where shall we find the means to finance reform of our system of education?”

Envision Maine’s report “Reinventing Maine Government” lays out the bare facts with frightening clarity.

Maine spends $2 billion annually on K-12 education. That works out to approximately $13,500 per student, and puts us 25 percent above the national average of $10,300 per student.

Maine’s student-teacher ratio of 11.3 is the second-lowest in the country, far below the national average of 15.8.

While student enrollment has dropped by more than 20,000 over the past decade, nonteaching administrative and support personnel have increased.

Today, Maine’s public elementary and secondary schools employ approximately 16,000 teachers and approximately 22,000 nonteaching staff.

And Maine’s school year is 175 days, significantly less than the national average of 180 days, far below the national suggested standard of 200 days and barely in sight of many of our Asian and European competitors with totals up to 240 days per year.

And what is the outcome of this institutional effort?

“In 2009,” the report notes, “only 37 percent of Maine’s eighth-graders tested as ‘proficient’ in reading … (and) only 36 percent of our fourth-graders” met that standard.

Eighth-grade math scores “plummeted from 1st place nationally a decade ago to 24th place in 2007.”

Our dropout rate increased. Our seniors score below the national average on the SAT. On and on. Even if restricting the comparisons to similarly rural states, Maine’s outcomes are lower and our spending higher.

Clearly these trends are unsustainable, financially and educationally. So what is to be done? Where are the monasteries to confiscate?

The answer, of course, is — no, not the Turnpike Authority; they’re mendicant friars compared to the real motherhouse: the K-12 education system itself.

As in 16th-century Britain, the answer is right in front of us. It’s not new money; it’s redirection of money that’s already here flowing through the system. The key is finding better ways to spend it.

Like the freeholders and tradesmen of Henry VIII’s England, Maine citizens pay their tithe in property taxes to their local schools, which dutifully perform their traditional rituals of instruction and assessment for an ever-declining flock. To that money is added the less visible share coming from state income and sales taxes and distributed through a formula so arcane as to tax the skills of an abbey full of Thomistic scholastics.

Our last governor attempted to wrestle some savings from the efficiencies of administrative consolidation. But like a pope trying to force a merger of the Jesuits and the Dominicans, his efforts produced much polite bowing and scraping, enormous organizational flux, much passive resistance and little financial savings.

Any real hope for educational change rests in Envision Maine’s final recommendation: Transform public schools through innovation and experimentation. Establish charter schools; involve businesses more closely in curriculum development and instructional experiences; create second-chance schools for dropouts; create a recovery school to take over schools that repeatedly fail to meet standards; create a “postsecondary options” program (perhaps the governor’s fifth year of high school); increase the use of distance education — not just recorded lectures, but high-production- value shared educational activities that no single school can afford to develop but that could economically be shared across the state.

If we wait until the budget crisis passes, we will never reform education and we will, as a result, never realize our economic potential.

We must take the institutions in front of our faces and have the courage and political leadership to wrench them into the 21st century.

Charles Lawton is senior economist for Planning Decisions, a public policy research firm. He can be reached at:

clawton@maine.rr.com

 

Copy the Story Link