Amid all the debate over the consolidation of school districts, few seemed to notice last week as the state backed away from a key piece of the Maine Learning Results.

Education Commissioner Susan Gendron announced that she planned to recommend the state scrap its local testing program. This move, she believes, would help schools and teachers focus more on learning and less on testing.

While it’s hard to argue with a plan to allow students to do more learning, it’s worth asking why school districts expended so much effort on developing these local assessments if all they did was distract them from learning.

The answer to that is, well, complicated. The development of local assessments was tied in to a changing approach to teaching, which has been taking place not just in Maine, but in schools across the country in recent decades. Many school systems have begun to focus less on traditional methods of teaching – lecturing and listening – and more on interactive teaching methods that are intended to lead to a higher level of comprehension of the material for a greater number of the students.

In Maine, this shift in educational theory took the form of the Learning Results. Adopted as law in 1996, the Learning Results had been in development for at least seven years before that. It was one of the most ambitious education reform plans in the country.

As a part of the Learning Results and other initiatives like it, educators were recognizing that traditional paper tests weren’t always the best way to measure achievements. They often rewarded skills like memorization, rather than general comprehension.

So, the state decided to develop its own assessments. As though that goal weren’t ambitious enough, Maine – a state that believes in local control – decided to do many other states one better by allowing each district to develop its own assessments.

The problem is, many of the state’s local school districts didn’t have the resources or the expertise to carry out such a plan. Instead of recognizing this basic fact early in the process, the state watched as local school districts foundered and struggled to figure out how to comply with the state’s new mandates. Teachers didn’t have more time, just more work.

Then, after years, the state comes along and says, “You know what? On second thought, never mind.”

Not all has been lost, of course. Many school districts were able to develop local assessments that will help them to improve their curriculum and instruction in the future as they figure out what works and what doesn’t.

The state and federal government, however, could take a valuable lesson away from this little tale: Large changes to our educational system require more than regulation. Officials need to lead not just in laying down the law, but in making sure those expected to carry out the changes get the expertise they need to do it, and they need to make sure the goals they set are reasonable based on the resources available.

Brendan Moran, editor