As a student at Kamehameha Schools, I was often reminded that behind me were 10 other children waiting for a chance to get into Kamehameha. I wondered where those 10 children ended up if they didn’t have the same opportunities
As a student at Kamehameha Schools, I was often reminded that behind me were 10 other children waiting for a chance to get into Kamehameha.
I wondered where those 10 children ended up if they didn’t have the same opportunities I had. Parents overwhelmingly agree that if money was not an issue they would send their children to a private school like Kamehameha or Island School.
My own parents sacrificed their financial future and years away from my brother and me to send us to boarding school, knowing our development as individuals was best cultivated somewhere else. Anywhere else but Hawai‘i’s public schools.
Hawai‘i’s public education system has become an inefficient bureaucratic nightmare and our families are suffering because of it.
Year after year, Hawai‘i ranks as one of the nation’s worst public school systems in terms of classroom quality, SAT scores and graduation rates. Yet Democrats, after 50 years of control and broken promises, continue to use the same formula for failure expecting a different result. Isn’t doing the same thing and expecting different results the definition of insanity?
I believe education is the vehicle to unleashing an individual’s potential. Board of Education members and state legislators must not share my beliefs, as they have continually refused to find innovative solutions to fix our broken public education system.
Since 1976, the Department of Education has seen an 863 percent increase in funding while enrollment in the public school system remained relatively unchanged. Our national ranking in education, third worst in the country, also remained unchanged. How has this huge increase in funding not produced results and improved Hawai‘i’s national rankings?
Blame the top-heavy structure of the DOE, which pulls money and resources away from the education of Hawai‘i’s students to pay for bureaucracy and inefficiency. We are the only state in the country that still uses this centralized system and our lack of improvements over the past decades is a clear indication that we must change the fundamental organization of the DOE.
According to 2006-2007 DOE reports, only $1.6 billion out of the $2.4 billion appropriated to the DOE trickles down to the school level. What should be an allocated $12,000 per student suddenly becomes $8,000 per student. We don’t get what we pay for when it comes to the education of our children.
There is no single answer to fixing education but we must be innovative in making all the necessary changes for the future of our children.
We must remove government bureaucracy and establish locally administered school systems. We must empower our children with high expectations and results-oriented curriculum, expand charter schools and offer school vouchers to give Hawai‘i’s families freedom to choose. We must challenge our students to learn and grow in the classroom, to see public education as their key to opportunity and prosperity, and to expect more from their schools.
Our children are our future. No matter what we do, we must show our children we are committed to them by fixing our public education system.
• Jonah-Kuhio Ka‘auwai is the chair of the Hawai‘i Republican Party.
