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Hawaii’s public schools
up for decentralization
The Lingle administration's deliberately loose plan for decentralizing Hawaii's public school system to get more money and power into the individual schools will be launched Nov. 4, ready for modifications based on the public's feedback.
Top officials of the Hawaii Government Employees Association, the union representing principals, vice principals, education officers and nonteaching white-collar workers in the Department of Education, met with top aides of Gov. Linda Lingle earlier this month to discuss the reform effort.
"We all have the same goals: empowering school administrators, getting the decision-making authority down to the lowest levels and improving education," said HGEA spokesman Randy Kusaka.
Randy Roth, Lingle's senior adviser on education policy, and UCLA professor William Ouchi, the administration's unpaid consultant on education reform, both described the meeting as positive.
"The mood could not have been more upbeat," Roth said. "We were asking their help in reaching principals and talking to principals and listening to principals, and they were anxious to extend that help."
The union was interested "in getting principals comfortable at what's going on and helping us learn from principals whatever it's going to be that's going to help shape this in the right way," he said.
A 22-member citizens committee Lingle assembled for the project met and approved a schedule of 10 public hearings during three weeks of November, starting at Wilcox Elementary School in Lihue.
A subcommittee was named to draft both a detailed document of the preliminary proposals for changes along with a brief summary listing the "essence of the system" being proposed.
Committee member Mike O'Neill, chief executive officer of Bank of Hawaii, said he met with the members of the Business Roundtable, a group of top business executives, seeking to get that group coordinated with the Hawaii Chamber of Commerce on the reform effort.
While business executives have a strong interest in education reform, "it's also understood that this will get very political very quickly," something businesses like to avoid, O'Neill said.
While Lingle's rejected proposal to the 2003 legislative session called for seven elected school boards, she told her committee that the number is open for discussion.
Lingle also raised the education reform issue during a speech to the Hawaii Developers Council meeting, accusing legislative leaders of being out of touch with the public schools because many send their children to private schools.
"The reason that this situation has been allowed to continue is because the leaders of our state are not dealing with public schools on a personal level. Their children are not in public schools," she said.
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