Saturday, March 27, 1999

Illustration by Kip Aoki, Star-Bulletin

Hawaii's public school system is a bad apple
and the rot will only get worse, right?
Not necessarily. Here's a plan for making it
a top national performer in 10 years.

By David Rolf
Special to the Star-Bulletin

Remember the old story about the emperor's new clothes? His tailors, who had failed to complete his new garments, pantomimed motions in the dressing room and cleverly convinced the naked emperor that they had just outfitted him in invisible clothes.

When the emperor strolled among the people, everyone played along because they were too afraid to tell him he was naked.

Most Hawaii educators know that our Performance Standards are like the emperor's new clothes and are too afraid to say anything about them, too.

I have proof. To check out Hawaii schools Superintendent Paul LeMahieu's insistence that Hawaii already has good public education standards, I picked up a copy of it and asked permission to visit a public school fourth-grade class recently.

During my visit to the classroom, I received permission to quiz the kids on the materials they were supposed to know:

"Kids, what is the Law of the Splintered Paddle?" I asked. No one answered. I took a moment to tell them the wonderful story of King Kamehameha, but no one had previously heard of it.

How about the state motto? Again, puzzled looks. Eventually, after prompting them with, "Ua mau ke ea...," some joined in, but that was because their fourth-grade teacher had just taught it to them. According to the standards, they should have learned it in earlier grades.

With regard to the American flag, most of them didn't know the significance of the 13 stripes.

If Schools Superintendent Paul LeMahieu's response to my little field trip is that I only visited one class, then I invite him to join me at another. Any number.

The fact is, rigorous education standards work. I am a fan of them in school reform. Anyone who isn't pretending, like the recent Performance Standards Review Commission, would also know that, in Hawaii, we don't have real standards.

Ours are faux standards. They are the emperor's new clothes.

National reviews by respected organizations like the Fordham Foundation (which reviewed all state standards) gave Hawaii a D-minus. Somehow, this news was not reported to the Board of Education and state Legislature. It's easier and safer to pretend otherwise.

We know that rigorous education standards, like those in Texas and Connecticut, help boost student achievement in reading and math, particularly when they are backed by testing.

Yet Hawaii has had faux standards in place since 1994. If they were effective standards, Hawaii kids would likely not have landed in last place among kids tested in 39 states on the National Assessment of Education Progress fourth-grade reading test.

Ken Nelson, the executive director of the National Education Goals Panel, was in Honolulu during the national announcement of the reading scores. He said the parents of Hawaii should be alarmed. "It's like kids in the other states are on (education) escalators. And they are moving up at a faster rate than Hawaii kids," said Nelson. "Now, with your recent scores, it appears you (in Hawaii) are moving backward."

Hawaii's fourth-graders dropped from 19 percent in the "proficient" category in 1994, down to only 17 percent in the 1998 NAEP scores, just released. Hawaii's kids produced the lowest state scores in the nation.

"Fourth-grade reading is a gateway measurement," Nelson said. Kids who are behind on this key skill will likely fall even more behind as they progress through the system.

Why is it alarms that would be sounded in every other state and community in the nation were not set off here? Simple. In Hawaii, it seems that we've grown accustomed to such bad news over the years. In fact, BOE Vice Chairwoman Karen Knudsen publicly chastised a newspaper letter writer who said we should panic.

The same knee-jerk response to such horrifying news has been exhibited in the 1970s, the '80s and throughout the '90s.

Now, almost three generations of kids have been given what education expert Checker Finn of the Fordham Foundation calls the "thin gruel" of faux education reforms with non-existent or weak standards.

We're in a terrifying 90-day window. Education officials are about to make decisions that will do to another generation of Hawaii kids what they have done to three other generations in three previous decades.

Frankly, I wouldn't mind a little panic right now. Decisive corrective action to avoid this coming iceberg would be welcome.

Fortunately, there is hope. A just-completed study on the new education reforms being used around the nation has some good news for Hawaii, if it pays attention to the right things.

The study, which included E.D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge and Robert Slavin's Success for All, has shown that improved student achievement results were produced in a wide variety of public schools around the nation.

The country's two largest national teacher unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, paid in part for the study of 24 comprehensive schoolwide reform models which have received most of the new Obey-Porter federal grant money.

In 1997, Congressmen David Obey and John Porter came up with the idea of federally funding schoolwide reforms which have been shown to work in schools around the nation during the past 10 years.

Hawaii, during that time, struggled through years of false starts and failed programs, including ineffective local school management (SCBMs) and our current D-rated Performance Standards.

This year, however, 10 Hawaii schools have received Obey-Porter grant money to implement new schoolwide reforms. Each school gets $50,000 to $100,000.

They join Solomon Elementary in Wahiawa, which launched Core Knowledge on its own two years ago, and Pope Elementary, which has already achieved extraordinary results in student reading scores with its Success For All program.

Additionally, Kauluwela Elementary has just obtained $20,000 in Goals 2000 federal grant money to launch its Core Knowledge curriculum.

That's 13 Hawaii public schools which are launching reform programs. Seven Lutheran elementary schools in Hawaii have also begun the rigorous Core Knowledge curriculum on their own.

We've just learned that 15 more public schools will have the opportunity to join in comprehensive schoolwide reforms in July using redirected state Title I funds and Goals 2000 grants.

That will be a total of 28 public schools and seven private schools using the proven reforms this coming year. Some of these reforms being adopted by Hawaii's schools include: America's Choice Schools, Roots and Wings, First Steps (a New Zealand program), Light Span, Success for All and Core Knowledge.

Of the above, the AFT and NEA said that Success for All showed strong results in improving student achievement in reading, while Core Knowledge showed promising results in improving overall student achievement. Roots and Wings was rated marginal.

No rating was given to America's Choice, because it did not yet have four independent evaluations of student performance. How interesting that five of the 10 original schools in Hawaii's first Obey-Porter program selected America's Choice, a reform with no independent student performance rating. It is of further concern that one official at DOE says this reform "most closely matches what we have now."

The really good news for Hawaii? It only needs to add eight schools with proven Obey-Porter schools reforms (that somehow could move 100 percent of their kids into the proficient category in reading) to boost the state total to 3,000 fourth-graders at that level. This would boost total statewide performance up to 21 percent.

That's a significant 4 percent jump. And just by having eight schools install the rigorous Obey-Porter school reform models. It shows the incredible value of adding even a few high-performing schools.

Let's say, though, that it is unreasonable to suggest that all students in these Obey-Porter schools could achieve at the proficient level. Yet, even if only one-fourth of the basic or below students in these schools could be brought up to the proficient level, it would only take 32 Obey-Porter schools to do the job.

When you add 64 more schools with reforms three years later, you boost 1,000 more students into the proficient category. Then, three years later, in the year 2007, if you add another 64 schools, that's another 1,000 students.

By the year 2010, all 170 of the K-6 schools could be on board, with 5,400 students landing in the proficient category. That would be enough to place us among the top 10 states, if the other states remained as stagnant as most have during the last 10 years.

Imagine, being one of the top 10 states in the nation when it comes to public education! It would be the real beginning of economic prosperity -- attracting every international business imaginable.

Obey-Porter reforms cost about $100,000 per school in the first year. There would likely still be 250 total schools in operation in 10 years (K-12). There are 240 now.

So that would mean about $25 million in funding for this fantastic four-stage rocket that could zoom Hawaii right to the top group of states.

The total amount is a pittance in funding, over 10 years, when considering the benefit these rigorous education programs could provide for our state and children.

With this funding and public resolve, we could outfit the emperor with some real clothes. We wouldn't have to pretend any longer that we have standards and reform.

---

David Rolf is an advertising executive, a Mililani resident
and serves on the Future of the Goals Task Force, a committee
of the National Education Goals Panel.