Schools Face Their ?Bed Time? (Gwen Moritz commentary)

House Democrats, hoping to appease the rural interests up in arms against Gov. Mike Huckabee’s historic proposal to merge school districts with fewer than 1,500 students, say consolidation should be “based on performance standards and accountability rather than numbers only.”

They are wrong on this one. And they may regret it when they find that their performance and accountability standard could mean the consolidation of some districts that the governor would have left intact.

Too many lawmakers, like the terrified local school administrators and school board members they represent, persist in the wrongheaded mindset that consolidation is a form of punishment. They remind me of my 8-year-old, who thinks I’m punishing him when I say it’s bedtime. Gov. Huckabee used to take the same attitude, but when he faced squarely the job of delivering an adequate and equitable education to every child in the state, he also faced the unpleasant but inevitable fact that it’s bedtime for scores of inefficient school districts.

Over at the Arkansas School Boards Association, the official argument is that the Supreme Court’s decision in the Lake View case didn’t specifically require consolidation. I hope this gives the ASBA some sort of comfort, but it is virtually meaningless. The Lake View ruling repeatedly noted the state constitution’s requirement of an “efficient system of free public schools.” I haven’t heard of anyone willing to look ridiculous by claiming that our patchwork of 310 districts fits that description.

The court also pointed out that legislators, not the school folks, are ultimately responsible for delivering adequate and substantially equal educational opportunities, both in terms of curriculum and facilities, to every student. Efficiently delivering adequacy and equity does, in fact, require consolidation, even if it the word isn’t specifically used.

The existence of a school district shouldn’t depend on the success (or failure) of its current administration. On the contrary, a school administration should exist to meet the need for its services. Business readers will understand this intuitively: Just because you have an excellent manager doing the best he can with an antiquated, inefficient plant doesn’t mean you shouldn’t replace the plant with something newer, better and more efficient. And it is the essence of efficiency to try to meet the demand with as few plants and as few managers as possible. In the business world, this is called “right-sizing.”

I am fully aware that education isn’t a for-profit undertaking and that the business model is not a perfect analogy. But school administrators aren’t really educators. They are managers who facilitate the job of educating, and it is right and fitting and woefully past due for this state to streamline the job of facilitating education in order to give more resources to the actual job of educating.

As former state Rep. David Matthews of Lowell, a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Public Education, told legislators in an e-mail last week, the idea of basing consolidation decisions on meeting educational standards is a “trap for the unwary.”

“If you allow a district to exist, you will have to be sure they are successful, no matter what the cost. Believe me, the cost will be way more than you want to pay,” Matthews said.

“As painful as it is, there is no financially feasible way to continue to operate with 310 districts,” he wrote.

Legislators who truly had their minds around the new reality — that they are personally responsible for the learning that goes on in this state, not just funding formulas — would be looking at the sorry state of student achievement in their legislative districts and feeling the humiliation of personal failure. They would be asking how few districts we could get by with, rather than how many we can preserve.

The rightness of the governor’s plan is so obvious that I feel ridiculous having to explain what’s right about it. It’s like having to explain why an 8-year-old has to go to bed at night.