What entity would, in all seriousness, spend 12 years training a person for the work force at a cost of more than $88,000, and then never track to see whether the person could actually perform as trained?

The answer? Public schools.

It's true.

A huge portion of the state budget, and the lion’s share of municipal budgets are spent on our public school systems and we don’t even know — with any degree of certainty — what programs in which schools work the best, or which schools produce the students most likely to succeed.

That’s because, while we know what students are doing when they’re in school, they are not tracked after they graduate from high school. We know that 65 percent of high school graduates immediately enroll in college, but that’s the end of the data. There is no follow-through to see how many students graduate from college, how long it takes graduates to earn their degrees, and what they ultimately do with those degrees in the work force.

So, how could we ever know what combination of education works best?

Maybe art really is more important than statistics. Maybe a winning soccer program develops skills needed in adulthood more than anything a teen might learn in a dance class.

Who knows? And if we don’t evaluate what works in the classroom, how will we ever produce a continually engaged work force?

It’s astonishing, really, to think that during the 2008-09 school year, Maine — state and local governments — spent $18.7 million in schools to educate 194,536 elementary and secondary students across the state, and we have no idea whether the work done during that single year will have any lasting impact on students’ ability to attain and hold a job. Compound that by 12 years of public school education per student, and we’ve blindly spent hundreds of millions of dollars.

Maine actually spent much more than $18.7 million in 2008-09. That’s merely the state’s basic per-pupil cost for that school year ($9,625 average) multiplied by Maine's 194,536 students, which accounts for buildings, transportation, programs and personnel, and doesn’t factor in costs to operate the Department of Education and other programs and services provided in schools.

The real cost of education in Maine demands that we do something to evaluate success. And the real cost of an undereducated, unemployed work force demands it twice over.

This year, the Legislature attempted to address this problem by requiring schools to collect Social Security numbers so students could be tracked beyond high school, through college and into the work force.

Social Security numbers are the only tag that we carry through our entire lives, and it makes sense to track success that way, except for the very real worry of the criminal element lurking to steal identities. So school administrators all over the state are recommending parents don't provide their children's numbers.

Students could be asked to voluntarily provide information on their graduation dates and job history, but that’s a very scattered approach to data collection and it would be highly unlikely that a statistically relevant number of students would maintain a long-term commitment to report.

But the very real fact is that Maine has to evaluate how it spends money in our public schools.

On Tuesday, the Maine Compact for Higher Education will hold its fifth symposium on higher education to focus on what it calls Maine’s “economic imperative . . . to dramatically increase the education and skill levels of Maine’s workforce.”

Part of the symposium will include a forum of gubernatorial candidates, organized so they can respond to the Compact’s recently released white paper outlining its laudable goal of 40,000 Mainers holding advanced degrees by 2020.

The Compact’s goal is broader education, but the intended result is increased job creation.

“This is so important,” according to Compact Executive Director Henry Bourgeois, “everyone has a stake in it.”

He’s right, and the stake is not simply job creation. It’s making sure that we spend our tax dollars in schools in the best possible way, with the highest likelihood that we produce high-achieving students who are qualified for the job market.

That means Maine has to make some hard decisions about our schools. How the gubernatorial candidates respond to the Compact’s imperative will be a telling indication of whether they really want Maine to work.

editorialboard@sunjournal.com