You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, the Maine Children's Alliance reminds us in its report, "A Case for Cooperation II, How School Reform Can Work for Maine Students." The report sums up the progress -- or lack thereof -- toward school-district consolidation in Maine, and the alliance concludes that the current system of punishing districts for not consolidating is far less effective than it would be to provide incentives to consolidate.

In other words, the state needs to sweeten the deal.

As one former school superintendent told the alliance, "There are penalties for not acting, but no rewards for forming a new district."

In 2007, the Legislature approved a sweeping reorganization of Maine's school administration. The reorganization, contained in the state budget bill, was instigated by Gov. John Baldacci, who proposed drastic consolidation of the state's 290 separate school districts as a way to cut the cost of education. Education was then, and is now, the largest expenditure of property-tax revenue for municipalities and the cost of maintaining those 290 districts was a major part of that cost.

But, as the Maine Children's Alliance notes, there's been powerful resistance to the consolidation mandate. There are a variety of reasons, including Maine's strong tradition of local control. That tradition, and the history and way of thinking that lie behind it, will take a long time to change.

What could be changed more immediately, says the alliance, is the way the state goes about promoting consolidation.

The process, says the report, "was supposed to be quick and relatively painless ... (but) these expectations have not been realized." That's in large part because the savings have not easily emerged, with some districts claiming consolidation will increase their costs.

In district after district, significant cost savings have failed to appear when different partners are considered, at least over the short term.

Such has been the case in Waterville's attempt to forge partnerships with neighboring districts. After hundreds of hours of meetings over the last year, Waterville still finds itself without a suitable partner.

Why? Because, the alliance writes: "In reorganization of public institutions or private companies, there is little evidence that substantial savings can be realized immediately."

And in the end, when so much time is being spent crunching numbers that just don't want to be crunched, something equally important is lost: A focus on the educational benefits that could come from consolidation. Those benefits, for example, include the ability for a larger district to have highly skilled (and thus highly paid) teachers of specialized subjects ride circuit among district schools, with the cost shared by multiple schools.

The alliance has performed a public service with this in-depth and reasoned analysis of the status of efforts to transform Maine's school system. The alliance has an agenda -- appropriate in a children's advocacy group -- which it announced in its previous study of school reform. Its view is that school consolidation is a good thing for Maine because it can improve educational outcomes and also be more efficient and thus less expensive.

So it says the state should, as it did in the last round of school reform half a century ago, offer concrete rewards for consolidation. Those rewards could be financial incentives for districts that pull off consolidation, for example, funded by penalties for districts that don't. And the alliance recommends that the state press districts to focus on the educational opportunities available through consolidation, while diminishing their exclusive focus on the potential cost savings.

Getting to a successful consolidation of Maine's school districts will be a long slog. The initial legislation that mandated consolidation, passed as it was under budget pressures and without enough review, already has been modified once to help make consolidation easier.

As the alliance suggests, there are more modifications that could be made to the consolidation law to further increase its possibilities for success. And if consolidation succeeds, that's another way of saying Maine's children and taxpayers will better chance for schools that educate kids well -- and they'll use taxpayers' money wisely, too.