Parents say schools
mediocre but improving

Half of parents polled give Hawaii
education a C grade overall

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By Leila Fujimori
lfujimori@starbulletin.com

The bad news is half the parents surveyed in Hawaii continue to give public schools a C grade.

The good news is more parents now compared to three years ago say schools have gotten better and fewer say they have gotten worse, according to a recent survey.

It is the first time since the Hawaii Opinion Poll on Public Education began that there has been substantial change on whether schools have improved in the past five years.

"We believe the standards-based reform is headed in the right track," said Greg Knudsen, Department of Education's spokesman.

In this year's survey, 30 percent of parents said schools have improved while 23.6 percent saw improvement in 1998. And 14 percent of responding parents thought schools got worse, compared with 23.6 percent in 1998. There was little change in the percentage of parents who thought things remained status quo.

Results of the February public opinion poll by the Department of Education were released Thursday. The poll conducted by SMS Research has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Half (50.7 percent) of the public school parents polled continued to give the public schools an overall grade of C, 2.4 percent ranked schools with an A, and 20.8 percent gave them a B.

This year's results were slightly better than the 1998 results, with 1.6 percent of parents handing out As, 24.4 percent Bs and 48 percent Cs.

Elementary schools continued to receive higher grades than middle, intermediate and high schools in the new survey.

Parents assessed their own children's schools higher than public schools in general, with 49.2 percent grading them with As and Bs, compared with 23.2 percent for public schools in general.

"Their satisfaction of their own child's school is based on direct knowledge," whereas they judged more harshly schools statewide and nationally without the benefit of such knowledge, Knudsen said.

"If people have the impression that other schools are bad, then it still casts a negative shadow over public education in general," he said.

Low teacher salaries and run-down, poorly kept or inadequate facilities topped the list of biggest problems facing public schools in this year's survey.