One hopes that the districts will draw inspiration from Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, commander of U.S. Army forces inside the besieged city of Bastogne during the WWII Battle of the Bulge, who famously replied to a German request for his surrender of the city with one word: “Nuts!”

Indeed, with many districts finding consolidation to be more costly, rather than less, with at least one school district, SAD 61 in Cumberland County, reportedly informing the commissioner that it  does not intend to merge with anyone, and with efforts already being made to repeal the law through citizens’ referendum, it appears as though resistance to the latest great idea from Augusta is beginning to mount, and with good reason.

In January, the Maine Heritage Policy Center published a report challenging the very notion underlying this effort, which is that larger school districts necessarily do their jobs better or even cheaper than smaller ones. Analysis of evidence from other states demonstrated that in many cases, school system consolidation led to increased levels of administrative spending and bureaucracy. As a result, school districts became less, not more, accountable as they got larger.

Our newest research indicates that we needn’t have looked outside the state to find ways that school and school system consolidation can make the situation worse. A half century ago, another Maine legislature taken in by the “bigger is better” mantra passed a law that became known as the Sinclair Act. A review of what happened as a result of that law gives us a pretty good idea what to expect if current consolidation efforts continue.

The Sinclair Act was designed, as the current law is, to create larger school districts in the belief that bigger centralized school units would save money and improve educational services.  What happened?

To the joy of its supporters, no doubt, the law was fantastically successful at merging local school districts, with the result that the number of local independent school boards dropped by 50 percent over the 15 years following passage of the law. A drop of a similar scale in the number of locally-elected school committees should be expected again as a result of current consolidation efforts.

The law’s preferential state funding for the construction of consolidated schools, which is a feature of the new law as well, resulted in a consolidated school building boom that slashed the number of schools in Maine by 40 percent and doubled their average size. The new law contains provisions allegedly making it harder to close a school than before, but who can doubt that larger districts will eventually push for the closure of smaller schools, forcing local communities to absorb the costs of keeping them open which the new law allows them to do.

The Sinclair Act, again like the current law, was sold as a means of controlling administrative costs. But from 1950 to 1980, per-pupil spending on administration increased 406 percent in constant dollars. Administrative spending was 3.4 percent of total K-12 spending in 1960, but by the year 2000, it had nearly doubled, to 6.7 percent. This was despite the closure of hundreds of schools and, after 1970, a considerable decline in statewide school enrollment.

These administrative costs do not include spending on officials at the state Department of Education, whose numbers tripled from 1950 to 1980. The number of non-teaching “central office” staff in school districts, such as business managers and curriculum specialists, grew dramatically as well.

So as a consequence of Maine’s last effort at school district consolidation, school districts got bigger, schools themselves got bigger, the number and cost of school administrators got bigger, and the state Department of Education got bigger.

Overall per-pupil spending, which increased about a percent a year in the two decades prior to 1950, grew 164 percent in the 20 years after it, eight times faster. Today, we spend six times as much money per student, in constant dollars, than we did in 1950. 

In fact, the only thing that went down as a consequence of consolidation was the level of community involvement through elected school committees, a trend that is destined to continue under the new law.

It may well be, of course, that the education children receive today is six times better than it was in 1950, and that all this spending and school building and administrating has resulted in far better schools. Certainly teachers are paid more than they were, and students with learning disabilities are getting educations that they never would have received back in the Sinclair era.  Overall student performance gains, though, are extraordinarily hard to judge given the lack of measures of student achievement a generation ago.

Then there are the intangibles, such as the sense of community one gets in a local school, the sense of belonging. As schools and school districts nationwide have grown larger and larger, students report an increasing sense of alienation and a lack of personal connection. Yet all one hears is the relentless “bigger-is-better” mantra.

Indeed, no measures were included in the new law to repeal it in the event that the bigger districts and schools, increased administration, and decreased levels of community involvement likely to come from consolidation result in declining school achievement. There are no provisions to return local schools to local control in the event that we later realize that what we lost in this new era of consolidation was more important than what we gained.

The legacy of the Sinclair Act makes it clear where the course of consolidation takes us. Maine people need to decide whether this is the direction they want to go, and soon.

The commissioner of education would like to know by Friday.

Stephen Bowen is education policy analyst at the Maine Heritage Policy Center. He attended Penobscot Elementary School and George Stevens Academy in Blue Hill. His report on the Sinclair Act can be found at www.mainepolicy.org.