Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
Hawaii’s World
ONE of the things that makes Hawaii a wonderful state is the desire not to hurt others. In education, however, we may thereby be hurting everybody. We duck tough standards and accountability for fear some bureaucrat, principal, teacher or student may get hurt. Why Hawaii schools
have declinedFormer Schools Superintendent Charles Toguchi once wanted to trim the bureaucracy by keeping them all on the payroll without sending them back to teaching.
Instead he envisioned the "trimmed" bureaucrats moving to little clouds floating above the schools as school advisers. It was nonsense and, fortunately, it failed.
Superintendent Paul LeMahieu has focused on standards and accountability as his paths to better public education. Seems simple, but already resistance is gathering from those who might get hurt -- no matter the greater hurt to the entire state from graduating kids who aren't up to standard.
I'd say buy them off -- assure some economic security for those who might get shoved out of the system for not cutting the mustard.
It could be cheap in the long run -- just as it might still be cheap if Governor Cayetano would fulfill his 1994 election promise to buy principals out of their union with raises of as much as $20,000 to $30,000 a year for rejoining management.
Frequently I have fingered government union leaders as a main source of government's problems. But their hot shot lobbyists are just doing what good union leaders must do: work to benefit their members.
They have been kow-towed to because they could -- and probably still can -- make the difference between winning and losing elections for many legislators and the governor. And there has been no countervailing force, like a strong Republican Party.
It's these kow-towers we now should put in our gun sights.
Suppose the Star-Bulletin ran a tabloid-type full page headline at commencement time every recent year:
PUBLIC SCHOOLS UNDEREDUCATED 9,000 GRADS! Governor, Legislators Blamed It would create one heck of a stir, that's for sure. And it would be accurate.
We in Hawaii used to be proud of our public schools. Before World War II they educated the children of Asian immigrants so superbly that two McKinley High School grads later served in the U.S. Senate at the same time -- both with honor.
I date the negative shift back to statehood in 1959 and the government employees collective bargaining law of 1970. Until statehood we had a school board appointed by the governor and there was no question where responsibility lay. A good school system was the result.
SOON after 1962, when the Democrats won full power -- governor, Legislature, the works -- they did something later regretted by quite a few. They pushed a constitutional amendment for an elected Board of Education.
This diffused responsibility and power over education. Three attempts to repeal it have failed.
Next the Democrats passed a collective bargaining law in 1970 that put even principals in unions. Worse luck!
It has been just about all downhill for our schools since then. Getting rid of some of the union kow-towers when we vote next fall might help us recoup at least a few of the losses school kids and the general public have suffered.
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.