The Case for Integrating Decentralization into the Maine Educational System

It's going to require magical warriors

Matthew Ball Unsplash

It is no secret to anyone who has followed my thinking, that I view Maine since the 1970s as on the long incremental track toward authoritarianism and the new feudalism that inevitably evolves alongside a continually expanding wealth divide.

Many years ago I observed that “the entire Maine media coverage of Maine's economic development policies meets the definition of propaganda- consistently for decades presenting, in unison, a singular point of view from the perspective of those who benefit, told in unison by a chorus of supposedly independent news media and in unison also omitting significant facts.” and the chorus did not represent my perspective.

So in 2005, I said ”I’ll make another voice”, not expecting that I would receive much attention writing an obscure blog by nobody you ever heard about.

I did not take into account that the entirety of cyberspace is one big soup of algorithms tracking everything that is going on so if one starts reading legislation and writing about it, you get noticed, not by the masses but by others who share that interest, and many who don’t like a loose cannon having anything to say about it, even in obscurity.

In the nineties, the Maine Legislature assigns itself authority over the public educational system.

In 1995 the Maine Legislature created a legislative joint steering committee. Through the committee, the Legislature granted itself jurisdiction over education in Maine. The steering committee was authorized to conduct research and analysis on education in Maine beginning with public preschool and continuing through the university system and to be involved with every organization in Maine associated with any form of public education, excluding the Confucius Institute, which has now been officially discontinued but at the time it was active, had jurisdiction over itself.

In 1997 The Department of Education and the Department of Labor became joint administrators of The Workforce Investment Act, a program funded by the federal government.¹

Previously, in the 1970s, before the Maine Legislature took over central managing the economy, Maine had the fastest-growing economy in the nation among businesses employing up to100 employers.

1984 Maine Small Business Development Finance by Belden Hull Daniels pg 23

Data measuring changes in employment by establishment size between 1977 and 1979 indicate that while employment growth in establishments of 500 or more employees dropped substantially in Maine compared to substantial growth at the national level, growth ln establishments of less than 100 employees in Maine exceeded the national trend ….., the data indicates that Maine's economy may actually be becoming less concentrated compared to the national trend of growing concentration

In 1976, the Maine Legislature wasn’t happy with the way things were developing and cited the difficulty that small businesses have in finding capital as an excuse for assigning itself the power to centrally manage the Maine economy, but instead of making capital more accessible to small businesses it used small businesses and the rest of the untargeted economy to subsidize larger businesses.

Dolphin on a Wave, In 1976, Andersen Design was part of a community of small businesses growing at a healthy pace before Maine Central Inc intervened. Photo by Mackenzie Andersen

I have often wondered how Maine would have evolved if the State had not stepped in to manage our economic development and we had continued to grow as a state where the small and micro-business economy outpaced the rest of the nation. In the 1970s Maine was excelling and standing out as a counter-culture against what was happening in the rest of the country, and not only that but between 1970 and 1980, Maine's population grew by over 13 percent, exceeding the national rate of 11percent and far exceeding the average increase for the New England region of about 4 percent. ²Could the two areas in which Maine excelled over the rest of the country be related?

As I read the statutes that were subsequentially put in place by intervening central management and its accompanying philosophy, it seemed apparent, that if Maine kept going on the new track, Maine would become a state where only the wealthy live, starting with the coast of Southern Maine and spreading outward.

Hegemonic Propaganda:

Propaganda: the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person Merriam-Webster

Today the Talk listings in the Boothbay Register are notably not displaying the two articles discussed in my last post, Appeals board upholds DEP challenge to resource protection zone ruling, and CSD talks $11.4M draft budget, expanding adult ed.

Meanwhile, the three articles about the public discussion of the fifty-million dollar school project remain as permanent fixtures in the spotlight section of the Register’s home page, as if the progress of an architectural design for a fifty-million-dollar school funded by dark money is the one and only discussion to be had about education on the Boothbay Peninsula in Maine.

The non-profit fundraising projects displayed on Education Boothbay’s website are looking like everywhere else these days- a new tech training center, starting in middle school, focusing on the same specialized technology featured by the Advanced Manufacturing Center at the University of Maine - 3-D printing, which on its surface is fine, except for being an industry promoted at the expense of others, and on the public’s dime, starting in middle school programming young minds to choose one career path over others.

Since I have followed the development of Maine’s centralized job training programs for quite some time, I see very little difference, other than the age at which job training starts, between middle school and high school education, repurposed as industrial job training for the State’s “targeted sector” and any of the other job training centers that the State has created. The high school is also expanding its adult education classes and talks about being a community center, making it sound like the high school is expanding upon its traditional purpose, evolving from a high school to something like a community college.

Consistently the State and its private partners incorporate acquisitions into job training legislation and through a public-private investment pact, become the new owners of the means of production.

In 2015 voters were being sold on the “Jobs for Me' bill marketed as a jobs training bill but only 25% of the money was appropriated to the training purpose as the bill was being marketed to the public, while 65% was appropriated for a public-private matching fund to finance infrastructure and 10% allocated to manager’s salary.

LD 1373 The top section of the bill identifies that the amount to be allocated to tuition assistance and grants for students is $250.000,00 out of a total of 1000,000.00 (25% general fund for tuition assistance, 65% a public-private business matching fund, and 10% for a managers salary) Indefinitely Postponed, Jun 18, 2015

The facilities are tied by a trail of statutory provisions to the University of Maine which maintains the right to ownership of intellectual property rights of any work done within the facilities if the University declares that the true author is using the facilities more than incidentally. I have not yet confirmed whether a relationship with at least one academic institution and a technology training center allows the University to claim rights to the intellectual property of anyone deemed to be using the facilities “more than incidentally”, across the network, but that would be consistent with the underlying philosophy of public-private industrial partnering within the public educational system. The acquisition of equipment and facilities is not only about job training, it can potentially extend to claiming the rights to ownership of the intellectual property of others by the owners of the facilities.

5.  Relationship with academic institution.  A technology center shall establish a relationship with at least one academic institution in this State. The Department of Economic and Community Development shall establish guidelines for such a relationship and determine whether a technology center has met the requirements of this subsection.  

The principle that intellectual property rights are a function of the ownership of facilities is a communist idea. In 2011 that ideology was shot down by the US Supreme Court but only pursuant to federally funded labs. If the facilities are funded by the State and private investors, that ruling does not apply but the University of Maine is federally funded so it does apply.

Patent Ownership
The Intellectual Property Clause grants ownership of a patent to the inventor of the patent. In Stanford University v. Roche Molecular Systems Inc, 563 U.S. 776 (2011), the Supreme Court held that even when a researcher at a federally funded lab invents a patent, that researcher owns the patent. 

In 1999, §1921. Maine Patent Program was enacted as an educational program on patenting. The University of Maine claims that it can charge “a reasonable percentage of the royalties for any successful innovation patented through the program for services provided in registering a patent.

The board of the Maine Technology Institute can also claim ownership of intellectual property pursuant to the statutory charter of the public non-profit charity.

All of these instances speak to fully aware and focused intentionality. If the new means of production is 3-D printing, What do billionaires want to own? They want to own intellectual property rights to the software needed to print up popular items.

It is written into the statutes that The University of Maine is central to all the tech centers that the State creates, With middle and high schools being reinvented using the same model as community colleges, will the University of Maine’s claims to intellectual property rights, based on facility usage by the true authors, extend to students in middle school? A young student who comes up with an idea of great financial potential is a tempting low-hanging fruit for a hegemonic system to resist. Why should the author retain the intellectual property rights when using state-owned facilities, reasons the University. An author so young and naive and a court process is so expensive.

By acquiring the means of production as an accessory to job training, the State can encourage many people to use its facilities but those with a special talent might want to tread carefully. Use the facilities to learn but not to develop ideas if one wants to retain ownership of the property rights of one’s own intellect. With the Legislature laying claim to control over the entire public educational system and enacting predatory legislation over intellectual property rights, the only way to be free of that threat is through private educational systems. That is where the concept of the Andersen Design Museum of American Designer Craftsman comes into play as fiscal sponsorship that can make it possible for the young designers to acquire their own means of production where they can develop ideas without fear of predators, and work with others of their own choosing.

With public school systems being transformed into industrial training centers, then what is the difference between a business and a school? Andersen Design trained our employees on the job since 1952. What is the difference, other than our process and discipline, and philosophy and product, between training a person on the job to make hand-crafted ceramics, and training a student in a public school to do additive manufacturing?

Dolphin on a Wave, Andersen Design created its own technology, designing and making our ceramic body and glazes from raw materials using original recipes. Photo by Mackenzie Andersen

From the hegemony’s point of view, the difference is that the public-private industrial State needs workforces trained in additive manufacturing, not in making hand-crafted ceramics.

With independent non-profit fundraising being used for public institutions, primarily because it allows access to public funding that doesn’t have to be raised, we have arrived at the point where we must ask “What is the difference between a public institution and a private institution”? Through nothing more than a private fundraiser, Mr. Coulombe, and a group of unidentified contributors have taken over the direction of our public educational system.

With one catch. The caucus led by Mr. Coulombe is using a public resource, a public vote is required, which will not happen until 2023. Will the Register keep Mr. Coulombe’s project as a permanent fixture on the front page until then?

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the Museum. It is a viable alternative for community development. We are living in a time when David is winning over Goliath. Amazon workers win battle to form first US union!

The focus of the Museum, should it ever come to be, will be working grassroots entrepreneurs with a preference for handcrafted making processes, but it would be an “all things considered” decision process, not written in stone. The reason for giving preference to grassroots entrepreneurs and hand-crafted making is that those areas are not favored by the hegemonic system.

The paper 1984 Maine Small Business Development Finance by Belden Hull Daniels addresses the problem of accessible capital for the small business sector. In 1984, fiscal sponsorship had not developed as it has today. The Museum as fiscal sponsor addresses the problem that Mr. Daniels was trying to solve, which also created the excuse for the Maine State Legislature to institute the centrally managed economy, which did next to nothing about solving the problem of small business capitalization.

Optionalization! - a new jargon for the emergent new order!

3DP is a rising industry and applies across industries and so the public-private State needs to train its industrial armies to be competitive in the 3DP industries. This is what the repurposing of public education as industrial training looks like. And why should the Boothbay Peninsula be any different from everywhere else?

Does the world need cultural options?

The more important question to most is “Is it profitable to become a cultural option to the hegemonic culture?

That raises the next question, ” How profitable does a culture need to be? Can a culture settle for being a sustainable culture?

The global 3D printing market size was valued at USD 13.78 billion in 2020 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.0% from 2021 to 2028. Globally, 2.1 million units of 3D printers were shipped in 2020 and the shipments are expected to reach 15.3 million units by 2028. A Market Analysis Report

And yet, still over half of the student body needs special intervention, and our teachers need to be taught as well and we need a higher teaching budget to attract the “quality” teachers- and what does that mean? Not that we don’t want our teachers to be paid - but are they talking industry specialists?

I am watching the docudrama on Hulu about Elizabeth Holmes, who started a billion-dollar company with the top names in industry and government on the board, based on a technology that was little more than a concept in Elizabeth Holmes’s mind that didn’t work, promoted as a health industry innovation, it was actually an endangerment to the health of those who relied on it. Holmes was recently found guilty of fraud and awaits sentencing in the fall after the trial of her partner concludes.

Throughout the series, the characters are saying that they are going to change the world, disrupt the industry, and all the rest of the repetitive jargon. One might interpret this as satire but then up pops the ad for Bloomberg portraying similar characters saying exactly the same words. Is it or is it not satire? At least we can say it is old. Get over it! Everyone changes the world but when the characters inhabiting the new tech world say they are going to change the world, they are talking about global top-down change, change that will make them billionaires.

The hegemony is real and we have to deal with it, but it may be losing control due to broken promises and false narratives, once believed, some of it once true, but as the wealth divide keeps on growing, the corporate promise no longer resonates with reality.

The masses are no longer predictable as if a collective unconsciousness awakening is underway, first the great resignation, and then the tenacious resistance of the Ukrainian people, while locally, that uninformed description “needing special intervention” begs the question, are young minds proving resistant to being molded by an external agenda? We need the fifty-million dollar school to attract young people to the Peninsula, said Mr. Coulombe. He wasn’t talking about the young people who are already here. Mr. Coulombe sees education as a means to an end, the gentrification of the Peninsula, which will inevitably replace many of the pre-existing inhabitants, including students.

Here is my vision that accepts and incorporates the hegemonic order while integrating and encouraging the complexity of the real world.

Industrial training middle school and high school courses are available as an option located centrally in a region of municipalities.

Any student in the region of municipalities has equal access to courses at the industrial training center, preferably funded by industry, not by the public, in order to be fair to all industries. Large industries have the funds to fund their own training facilities, Smaller industries could potentially find funding for training facilities through Model A Fiscal Sponsorship offered through a fiscal sponsor such as the Andersen Design Museum of American Designer Craftsmen if it ever becomes a reality-which depends on finding board members.

With the hegemony objectives served by a regional industrial training center, the municipalities within the region can develop other options for education, making each community unique. Technically, according to the rhetoric, statutory and otherwise, the industrial training in each community is sourced from within the community.

Sustainable financing incorporates cultural stakeholders, creating an “industry need” for the well-rounded education that middle and high school education once served.

Many still want the traditional public school education that focused on the holistic individual and on a well-rounded education, but the Catch22 is that the State controls our public educational system and is repurposing education as industrial job training.

The other Catch 22 is that the government is using non-profit fundraising.

Non-profit fundraising can also be used for a private educational system.

1. http://www.mainelegislature.org/legis/statutes/26/title26sec2006.html

2. 1984 Maine Small Business Development Finance by Belden Hull Daniels pg 16

Also published on Medium's Data Driven Investor as Ownership of Intellectual Property and the Industrialization of Public Education on April 4, 2022.