Last week, the Maine Department of Education (MDOE) held the state education summit, which has historically served as a place for teachers throughout Maine to receive training and discuss critical education issues. Even this year, some events supported schools with severe performance issues or school threat awareness. However, most of this year’s events focused on a controversial initiative spearheaded by MDOE Commissioner Pender Makin.
A significant focus of this year’s summit was “Measure What Matters,” which proposes to shift our state’s focus from traditional standardized testing and school subjects to less conventional skills and subjects. While the traditional education system in Maine may not be perfect, our recent drop in student performance compared to other states has likely been the result of too much education innovation rather than too little.
The “Measure What Matters” initiative is responding to this drop in student performance not by trying to improve test scores, but by creating new criteria to measure performance in place of traditional, objective measures.
Maine’s students’ performance has taken a massive dive in recent decades compared to other states. While there are multiple causes, a major issue is the shift away from the traditional education model–where teachers simply teach–to one where they juggle the responsibilities of a therapist and school administrator through what’s known as “social-emotional learning.” The result is that Maine went from one of the best-performing states in the nation in the 1990s to below average today.
Other states might see this massive drop in performance and think that the changes their system underwent during that period were the cause, but not in Maine. Commissioner Makin has doubled down and established a new initiative to reform the goals of our education system and move Maine’s goalposts for measuring success.
Instead of improving Maine’s performance in objective and measurable metrics, the MDOE wants to abandon those metrics. If Maine’s education system has goals that are not comparable to other states, we can no longer be a poorly performing state, which appears to be the true purpose of this proposal.
The tip of the spear was a session hosted by the Battelle for Kids “Futures co-lab,” a project that emphasizes the need for students to be “new smart” (or more connected to the “new world” and “new technology”) over “old smart” (which is the traditional idea of having and applying one’s knowledge). To get the public on board, the MDOE will travel around Maine throughout August and September holding workshops to incorporate local ideas to increase community buy-in.
The summit’s description of the presentation hosted by Battelle for Kids begins, “What makes a great school, and how can we measure it? All too often, test scores are used to measure and judge schools. Come be part of an effort to change that.” The obvious answer to the question is that you simply can’t measure a “great school” without comparing test scores, as a school can’t be great in a vacuum. Being “new smart” and drumming up fears about the future of schools amidst artificial intelligence technology are simply tools for the MDOE to move away from the objective measures of success that currently show schools are failing to teach our students what they need to know to be successful.
The MDOE made shaky assertions in advancing the argument that traditional education is no longer good enough for Maine’s future students. One group they hosted at the summit was the Minerva Project, an international organization that largely abandons traditional education subjects, instead focusing on cross-applied logic skills. The project has primarily focused on post-secondary education but has argued that their principles should be applied in K-12 education as well. While some have said it is the future of education, Minerva University has the goal of making students “global citizens,” with classes named “multimodal communications,” “empirical analyses,” and “complex systems.”
According to the session description hosted on the MDOE’s education summit website, the session led by the Minerva Project was intended for participants to “learn about current approaches working to eliminate ‘teach to the test,’ with a particular focus on the Minerva Baccalaureate: a Maine-based, rigorous, standards-based high school curriculum and diploma program that measures >10x more data points on student performance and engagement than any other high school delivery model, removing the need for any summative assessment.”
This may or may not be an effective way of teaching college students. Still, some critics have pointed out that the selectivity of the university and the caliber of students applying may skew any success stories from the project. Considering the intrinsic differences between university education and K-12 education, and the more diverse economic backgrounds of Maine public school students compared to Minerva University students, there is a serious question about what actual guidance Minerva University can provide Maine teachers.
Hitting again on the global citizen front, the summit featured the “Maine Solutionaries Project,” which focused on community-centric, project-based learning. Much of the material this group concentrates on uses vague, nonspecific language, making it seem like the project’s goal was simply to make students more involved in their local communities. However, looking at the community projects that students are doing shows clear political implications. Teachers are influencing students to support disproportionately leftist causes, such as green energy and recycling mandates, all advocated to local governments by children.
The League of Women Voters, a well-known left-wing policy advocacy group, even supported some projects. One teacher who trial-ran the project also spoke at the solutionaries project presentation about shooting down a student project focusing on local job market issues caused by immigration, stating that such concerns are not “real local problems.” A closer examination of the projects being done reveals that they manipulate students as young as elementary school into being mouthpieces for left-wing causes. The projects, time and time again, stressed the goal of being a productive global citizen, but few seemed to address being a good citizen of Maine.
Redefining success is the stated goal of the “Measure What Matters” initiative, and what has the initiative set as its goal? “Globally integrated citizens” – who will likely leave Maine for larger, more prosperous jurisdictions upon graduation, and activists who bog down local governments with countless different petitions and initiatives.
Recent work by Maine Policy has shown Maine’s schools are far better at creating activists than productive Mainers, and the “Measure What Matters” initiative is, effectively, the Maine Department of Education’s further commitment to this principle.