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Gathering Place
Mary Anne Raywid |
Let each island govern
its own education affairsSome people already are tiring of the struggle over educational governance and are questioning its bearing on school reform. As a member of the governor's Citizens Achieving Reform and Education committee, I am convinced that Hawaii's schools will never be able to work as we want them to until some of the current governance arrangements are revised.
As long as eight departments, in addition to the Department of Education, are intricately involved in running educational affairs, we won't be able to hold the DOE accountable for what ought to be its business. As long as the Legislature is in a position to micromanage what should be school affairs, we cannot judge the schools for the way they conduct their business.
Local boards of education are perhaps the most controversial current proposal. I want to state some of the major reasons I believe they are needed.
>> Most immediate is the matter of district size and its relation to school achievement. A respectable amount of research shows that the larger the school district, the lower the achievement levels of its students. And a compelling amount of research indicates that the relationship between the size of the school district and the success of its students is particularly strong for disadvantaged students. This would suggest that a large number of Hawaii's youngsters are being particularly penalized by our educational governance system, as are all of us who are especially concerned about achievement levels in Hawaii.
>> Neighbor islanders have strong resentments about the way Honolulu dominates and directs affairs across the islands. To say that the people on what we of Oahu call "the outer islands" want to run their own schools is to put it mildly.
And to say that they are entitled to do so is also to put it mildly. Given that they are taxpayers in a democratic state, and that in the other 49 states taxpayers exercise local control of their schools, it would appear that people here also should be entitled to control their own schools.
>> But there are two somewhat more practical and pragmatic reasons why I believe we ought to establish local boards of education. The first is the public schools' need for citizen support. The high private school enrollment in Hawaii is well known, as is the low esteem in which public schools are held. If governance is brought closer to the people, perhaps they will take more ownership of the schools -- even to the point of providing more monetary support for them.
The other practical reason for local boards of education is to stand as a countervailing force to the state Board of Education and DOE. These have represented the sole education authorities in the state for so long that schools and principals will not be able to exercise the new curricular, budgetary and staffing authority many of them want without having to oppose the old forces. This is, after all, what happened to School/Community Based Management, and then to charter schools. It also happened to the newly empowered schools in Chicago after the Illinois legislature had transferred authority to them from central headquarters: It took separate legislation, several years later, to complete the job in Chicago. That is why a countervailing force seems important to establish from the start here, even though the plan is to scale back the authority of the current BOE and the size of the DOE considerably. I hope we do it.
Granted, new governance arrangements won't assure us of student achievement. But I'm afraid that keeping the old ones may assure us a lack of it.
Mary Anne Raywid is a member of Governor Lingle's Citizens Achieving Reform and Education committee.