Posted on: Sunday, August 5, 2001

Editorial
Students deserve a fair shot at success

While we take his point, School Superintendent Paul LeMahieu used an unfortunate phrase in his reaction to news that Hawai'i students scored relatively poorly on a national "report card" test of math skills.

The result suggested the overall performance of public school students lags behind national averages in "proficiency" in basic math skills.

This news, said LeMahieu, should be a "wake-up call" for educators and others.

What?

If Hawai'i's parents, teachers, school administrators and students haven't heard the wake-up call by now, there is something more seriously wrong than our math proficiency.

The truth is that the results of our public education system — in both math and reading — have been lagging behind both national norms and our own expectations for years. We know what the problem is; what we have had trouble with is understanding how to fix it.

LeMahieu is on the right track with his emphasis on raising standards, measuring performance and demanding accountability. It has not been easy to turn the culture of our education system around on these goals, but it is happening.

Perhaps the most instructive thing about this latest test, called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is that it seeks to test "proficiency" rather than merely comparing one set of students with another, whether in another school, another district or another state.

Proficiency, after all, can be an absolute goal that rests within itself, not as a matter of competing with others. That's important here, because Hawai'i's public schools labor under a number of constraints that are not their fault or of their making.

In addition to the usual complaints about lack of resources or community support, Hawai'i's public schools face these obstacles as they are measured against national yardsticks:

• We have a single unified statewide school district. While this provides some clear advantages in terms of bulk purchasing, consolidated administration and equality in funding, it has its drawbacks as well. One obvious drawback is that the performance of this "district" includes the best- and the worst-performing schools, those from the most difficult neighborhoods as well as those from the most supportive. On the Mainland, within any state, some districts perform well, others poorly.

• A considerable percentage of the strongest and most motivated students is bled out of the public school system into a well-established and popular private school system. This "cream-skimming" inevitably hurts the schools left behind.

• The relatively high percentage of recent immigrants in our schools. We are not alone in this, of course, but the inevitable problems associated with English as a second language, culture and income disparities and the rest add an additional challenge for our schools.

Our particular challenges are, of course, no excuse for mediocre performance or lack of standards. We need to get past the stage of wake-up calls and get on with building a system that guarantees our public school students their fair shot at success.