Second Opinion
DOE problem is management

By Cliff Slater

The Department of Education’s superintendent was recently called into a meeting by his administrators and principals and was not allowed to speak — just to listen. Then his management staff spent nearly all day "in an attempt to get (the superintendent) to focus on problems they deal with daily."

At the risk of having Superintendent Paul LeMahieu accuse me of being "seduced into simplistic answers to these very deep questions," I would say we have a management problem.

It is not a new one. In the early 1970s, my wife and her fellow teachers helped unionize their school. They believed that a union would protect them from such DOE idiocies as team teaching, ITA alphabet, three-on-two and other management-imposed fads of the moment.

However, once organized, the union promptly jumped into bed with the DOE, and teachers have been sleeping out in the cold ever since.

There is solid evidence that the DOE has mismanaged our schools for the last 30 years. In 1960, our state’s schools were considered average for the nation as a whole. By 1998, Hawai‘i’s public school students were performing so poorly that combining Hawai‘i’s scores for reading and math put us ahead of just three states — Mississippi, New Mexico and Louisiana. This happened despite Hawai‘i’s spending being on a par with that of other states.

That the DOE currently misallocates resources was shown in the recent state auditor’s report. Hawai‘i’s 10 highest-cost schools spend twice as much as that of the 10 lowest-cost schools. In pointing this out, the auditor says, "similar schools generally should not differ significantly in their costs."

Yet the DOE persistently resists installing the Insight software that will analyze the financial data.

This 30-year mismanagement record indicates that there is something wrong with the way we pick superintendents for the DOE-a $1.3 billion enterprise with 24,000 employees, 240 locations and 190,000 customers. It has more employees than Hawaii’s eight largest companies put together.

In the past, we have selected superintendents from among our local education administrators. This last time, we went outside Hawai‘i, perhaps in the unconscious realization that people who have learned about management in badly managed organizations can hardly be expected to manage well themselves.

We typically pick them because they have superior credentials, they are articulate and they have political skill, which, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, is the ability to foretell the result that increased spending will have on Hawai‘i public education tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterward to explain why it didn’t happen."

We have never picked a superintendent on the basis of superior management skills. So it’s no accident that today we have a highly articulate, bright, well-meaning superintendent of education with a superb background in education theory but no management experience whatsoever.

Businesses looking for a CEO will focus first on managerial ability. You cannot get a degree in it. It is learned on the job — usually through failure since we cannot learn much from our successes. Only failure will develop the requisite modicum of doubt and paranoia essential to good management. To hire a manager who cannot recount his management failures, let alone has no experience, is suicidal.

A Ph.D. is great for technicians, teachers and theorists. It can be disastrous for a CEO simply because he tends to believe he knows everything about the subject. He does not realize how far he is from the trenches and so can lose touch with the only person who really matters: the lone teacher standing in front of her students.

That is the CEO’s job: to see that he has sufficient well-qualified, well-paid, well-supplied teachers together with disciplined students in a satisfactory work environment. This includes superior principals who, while demanding, will fight for their teachers. A real CEO will sacrifice every other expense to see that this happens. It must result in teachers feeling that management cares.

Such a CEO will, of course, be insufficiently pliant as far as the power community is concerned. So until our elected officials and the public worker union leadership are willing to stop sacrificing our children’s future to their exercise of power, Hawai‘i public education will go nowhere.

Cliff Slater is a regular columnist whose footnoted columns are at www.lava.net/cslater.

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