Susan Gendron’s tenure as commissioner of the Maine Department of Education, which ends at the end of the month when she steps down after seven years, was defined by two efforts that tried to change the way education has been structured in our state for decades.
She began her job in March 2003, as the implementation of the Maine Learning Results was the main priority for both the department and school districts across the state. The Learning Results were an attempt to standardize education so that Maine students were receiving the same education regardless of where they attended school.
But the promise of the Learning Results has not been fulfilled. It is one thing to create a policy that says all schools will be equal; it is quite another to make it so. Countless hours have been spent creating and distributing the standards and assessments, but they have not been totally absorbed into the classroom in the way that was needed. While some schools have altered teaching tactics so that all students learn, many still accept mediocrity, ignore difficult students and fail to challenge top students.
And we still don’t have a meaningful tool for measuring school against school and teacher against teacher so that poor performers can be improved and top performers copied.
Some of the blame falls on Maine’s long history of local control of education, which is resistant to state mandates, as well as with the teachers’ unions, which have long opposed any real kind of professional assessment. The Legislature, too, resisted some of Gendron’s ideas. But some of the blame also lies with Gendron for lackluster implementation of the policy.
Implementation was also the problem with the other defining struggle of Gendron’s time in office – consolidation.
The consolidation effort, announced by Gov. Baldacci in January 2007 and signed into law later that year, addressed a significant problem in a state that wasted too much money on administration in its 290 school districts. Even before the crises of this year, school budgets were tight and growing, and something had to be done to eliminate spending not directly tied to the classroom.
But the consolidation policy failed to take into account the disparate realities faced by Maine’s school districts. Small and large, urban and rural, they were all treated equally under the consolidation law.
Worse, the state somehow failed to see – or failed to care – that school consolidation would be seen as a threat to districts used to having input into the management of the schools that were the center of their communities. The consolidation law, which should have reshaped education in Maine slowly with an eye toward long-term stability, was quickly made the law of the land without the flexibility needed to allow input from local districts, many of which already had begun to consolidate services out of financial necessity.
Despite these missteps, Gendron should be given credit for pushing forward with the well-intended and much-needed consolidation plan when pressure could have led to its failure. Eventually, it will pay dividends, and its basic theory should be applied to other parts of government, as well.
Gendron has shepherded the state’s educational system to a certain point, and now it is time for someone new to look at the lessons of the past decade and push Maine schools forward. The next commissioner must be creative and convincing in dealing with the educational institutions resistant to change, and seek out educators across the state willing to take the measures necessary to improve education for all students.
There are talented, forward-thinking administrators and teachers in Maine itching to push the state in the right direction. They need a commissioner who can assure them that the state is a partner, not a parent.
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