AUGUSTA — Gov. Paul LePage said Tuesday that Maine has too many school superintendents and he plans to pressure school districts to consolidate administrations in the two-year state budget he will propose to the Legislature in early 2017.
“The issue is not the money in education, the issue is how the money in education is being spent,” LePage said during a talk show on WVOM radio in Bangor. LePage reiterated his dissatisfaction with the number of public school superintendents in Maine, comparing the state with Florida.
“We have 127 superintendents for 177,000 kids,” LePage said. “The state of Florida, who ranks number seventh in the best education system in America, has 3 million kids and 64 superintendents. That’s where the problem is. We are spending the money on the administration of our schools and not in the classrooms.”
The governor went on to say he believed teachers and students in Maine “are the two victims of our school system.” He said the state’s teachers union and the superintendents association “are the two winners.”
It’s not clear how LePage could force school systems to combine administrative functions. He did not offer any details of the plan. His staff did not respond to a question about the source of his information on Maine’s or Florida’s educational performance and ranking.
The Maine School Boards Association and Maine School Superintendents Association said LePage didn’t have his facts in order when he asserted that school administration is driving up costs. They cited a report from the Maine Department of Education showing administrative costs on the decline in Maine.
The report, submitted to the recently formed blue ribbon task force on education, shows that the state’s 96 full-time and 32 part-time superintendents account for about $12.3 million, or less than 1 percent, of the just over $2 billion total cost of public education, including local funding.
“Leadership matters, and the governor should know that,” Becky Fles, the president of the school boards association, said in a prepared statement. “Studies have shown that a strong school leader can make a difference in how a student does in school, even in districts where there is not a lot of money to spend.”
COMMENTS TIED TO QUESTION 2
Steve Bailey, a school superintendent in Damariscotta and president of the superintendents association, said LePage has long criticized administration and now appeared to be blaming both superintendents and principals for rising costs.
“As a group, we have reached out to the governor and his staff to explain that administrators in Maine wear many different hats and are committed to student success,” Bailey said.
LePage made the comments Tuesday in the context of a conversation about Question 2 on the Nov. 8 ballot, which will ask voters to approve a 3 percent income tax increase for households earning more than $200,000 a year, with the increased revenue being earmarked for public schools. LePage has said the tax increase will drive business away from Maine and make the state less attractive to high-income earners such as doctors and engineers.
LePage’s predecessor, Democratic Gov. John Baldacci, made an unsuccessful attempt to consolidate Maine’s public school system. LePage predicted his effort also would likely fail before the Legislature in 2017, but would then be a top issue for the 2018 gubernatorial and State House elections.
PREVIOUS CONSOLIDATION UNRAVELED
LePage also took aim at the Legislature, a recurring target of his criticism, saying lawmakers haven’t done their part to help bring greater regionalization and consolidation to public schools.
“They have been at fault for not willing and wanting to make the program that John Baldacci put forward. I’m not going to agree that it was the best program,” LePage said. “I’m going to say it was a great effort.”
LePage and Baldacci also agree in their opposition to Question 2. Speaking in September to WGAN radio in Portland, Baldacci said he believed schools need more funding, but raising taxes on a single income bracket was the wrong approach.
A law passed under Baldacci in 2007 sought to reduce the number of school administrative districts in Maine from 290 to just 80 regional school units, or RSUs. That law also allowed individual cities and towns to petition for withdrawal after a 30-month period, which more than 20 ended up doing – largely unraveling the consolidation effort.
LePage said Tuesday that he understood the desire for local control, but also suggested that if people wanted local control they should pay for it locally, which in Maine is largely in the form of property taxes.
He also said that since he had taken office in 2011, state funding for public schools had increased from $892 million a year to $1.1 billion a year in 2016.
“I have been the most pro-education governor in the history of the state,” LePage said.
Even so, the state has never achieved the 55 percent funding level for K-12 education that voters approved in 2004. The closest it got was in 2009, when it paid for 53 percent of costs. Currently, the state’s contribution is at 47 percent.
And many of the funding increases for public schools were in budgets negotiated by the Legislature and passed over LePage’s vetoes.
Rep. Brian Hubbell, D-Bar Harbor, a member of the Legislature’s Education Committee, agrees with LePage’s focus on more efficient and effective use of state funds for public education, but said the governor is oversimplifying the issue.
Hubbell said LePage has offered budget proposals for public education that have essentially been flat, but the Legislature has added to those amounts.
“Whatever the increases in education have been, have been a result of legislative increases,” Hubbell said. “The governor has a habit of using statistics that sound like they are precise and therefore accurate, but frequently I have found it impossible to verify those assertions he makes absolutely about either spending or school performance.”
CONFLICT ON EDUCATION RANKING
LePage also said Maine ranked low nationally in terms of the quality of public education. “We are not very high on the totem pole,” LePage said. “We ranked between 35th and 40th as far as quality of education in the country, and we are in the top 10 or the top 12, if I am not mistaken, in spending.”
But LePage’s numbers don’t square with at least two recently published reports on public education spending and quality.
A December 2015 report in Governing magazine that looked at 2014 U.S. Census data ranked Maine 15th in per-capita spending on K-12 public education, while a January report by Education Week that graded public education in all 50 states and the District of Columbia ranked Maine 14th highest.
That report looked at a variety of factors, including standardized test score results, high school graduation rates and percent of taxable resources spent on public education, among a host of other indicators. The report gave Maine a C with a score of 78.5. The national average for all states was 74.4. Florida, ranked 31st, received a C minus with a score of 72.4. The top scoring state was Massachusetts with a B+ grade and a score of 86.8, while the lowest-scoring state in the report was Nevada, with a D grade and a score of 65.2.
Sen. Rebecca Millett, D-South Portland, the ranking Senate Democrat on the Education Committee, said the governor was focusing on the wrong issues when it comes to public education in Maine and distorting the record on how funding for public schools was increased.
She, like Hubbell, said it was the Legislature and not LePage that pushed for additional state funding for public schools.
REPUBLICAN PARTLY ON BOARD
Millett also referred to the state’s report to the task force on education showing the costs of school administration on the decline in Maine.
“It’s really bizarre he’s focused on this because his own (Education Department) just a week or two weeks ago presented data showing that Maine’s administrative costs have gone down,” Millett said.
Rep. Matt Pouliot, an Augusta Republican on the Education Committee, shares LePage’s position on some of the issues.
“Simply pumping more money into education in our state is no way a panacea,” Pouliot said. He said he would rather see a statewide teachers contract to level the playing field for teachers across Maine. He also said he couldn’t necessarily agree with LePage’s conclusion that Maine was spending too much on school administration, or that school districts should be forced to consolidate.
“That’s really been a failed experiment in this state,” Pouliot said. “And it’s easy to point fingers at one person or the other being the problem and I don’t really think that’s necessarily the case. We do need good-quality administrators leading different districts in the state, but we also need to make changes in the way we negotiate contracts.”
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