Island Voices
How can executive raises be justified?

By Barb Bedient
Honolulu Resident

When our public-school teachers, who have been working without a contract for a long time now, started talking strike, I figured Gov. Ben Cayetano was just playing hardball, a typical stance as both sides worked to hammer out a contract.

When the governor shot down the mediated offers, it became a stone-cold stare-down contest, but still I had faith he would pull something out of the fire to avert a strike.

Then we learn Cayetano, having offered teachers less than half of what they are requesting, wants to award his appointed department heads, deputies and assistants raises up to three times what he offered teachers. The timing has been termed unfortunate by some generous souls. This was not unfortunate, this was an in-your-face smackdown to teachers.

The appointed deputies and assistants for whom Cayetano is requesting raises up to 29 percent already have salaries that start at the level where a master teacher's pay basically tops out. Here's an interesting challenge: a job swap of any randomly chosen principal of a public school with any randomly chosen deputy or assistant, and we'll see who breaks first in the new job.

The governor would have those of us with children in the public-school system believe that those greedy teachers’ pay raises will mean our children will have no books, computers or desks. Maybe we would have fallen for that had not the news been sprinkled with stories of aquariums, a new governor's mansion and other grandiose plans over the last few months. Bottom line is that without teachers, all the books and computers we can fit on O‘ahu won't be of use to a child who knows not how to use either one.

No one has ever set out to get rich by being a public-school teacher, but there is no aloha or honor in seeing Hawai‘i’s teachers kneeling at the bottom of the American educational pay scale. Teachers may not be primarily motivated by money, but they are not stupid, either. And teachers have the same bills to pay as Cayetano’s deputies and assistants do.

Teachers do, however, have one thing going for them: They are easily employable in other fields (and other states) because they are literate, can handle responsibility and are used to justifying their existence with every single SAT test.

Unless Cayetano has an educational epiphany soon, we will all be watching an educational train-wreck in the news.

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