• Education reform Education reform To BOE, or not to BOE, that was the question of the week in the Legislature. Gov. Linda Lingle is calling for a statewide vote in the fall on whether to create local, county-wide school
• Education reform
Education reform
To BOE, or not to BOE, that was the question of the week in the Legislature.
Gov. Linda Lingle is calling for a statewide vote in the fall on whether to create local, county-wide school boards. Hawai‘i is the only state in the union that has a statewide school board and central school system. The governor is saying this is holding back education reform, and that parents — and voters — on Kaua‘i and other Neighbor Islands are having their schools run mostly by bureaucrats based in Honolulu who may know little about the schools in Hawai‘i’s rural islands.
State School Superintendent Patricia Hamamoto is being outspoken over the issue, and following up the governor’s remarks, and events in the Legislature, with her own comments, which back keeping the status quo Board of Education in place. Her speeches are something new for a state department head, and sound like they should be coming from the floor of the State Senate or the State House of Representatives. Hamamoto also sent to the press on Friday the state Department of Education’s own take on where tax dollars go once they come into the DOE’s coffers. The numbers show about an equal spread between funds that go into the classroom and funds that go into the bureaucracy that runs our public school system. Lingle’s numbers showed a more disparate breakdown, with the DOE bureaucracy getting more of the funds.
Lingle’s proposal could have died Thursday in a House education committee, but instead moved forward, for discussion purposes. Late Friday evening her reform proposal died through a committee vote. Now the issue moves on to the State Senate.
The proposal is a test of wills, and clearly a partisan issue.
Quashing a proposal to let the voters decided on this issue many have a political backlash when legislative elections come up in the fall.
Stepping back from the politics underlying this issue, with or without county-level school boards Hawai‘i’s education system needs a major overhaul. That’s not going to go away. Even using the DOE’s own figures it shows that the bureaucracy’s need for cash is a major consideration when looking at public education. This huge amount of funding on a bureaucracy needs to be scaled back, and much more needs to be moved over to the classroom side. Both Hamamoto and Lingle have acknowledged this.
How many music and art classes are there in our public schools? How many teachers spend their own funds to help their students learn? How come physical education is limited to a few quarters for public high school students? How many non-classroom staffing positions need to be cut before the above three questions change?
