Posted on: Wednesday, September 26, 2001

Editorial
Economic crunch may help our classrooms

While it was just mentioned in passing, one of the stronger ideas to come out of Gov. Ben Cayetano's planned response to our economic crunch has to do with education.

The school system, Cayetano noted, is short of teachers and is having a hard time filling the vacancies with qualified, credentialed educators.

One possibility, he suggested, would be to make some of those positions available to people laid off from other sectors of the economy. They could be taken in under the emergency hire system.

While this could be seen as simply a short-term fix to help people in temporary need, there is a longer-term opportunity here. In a back-door way, this can push the state closer to having an education system that is truly performance-based, with a strong program of accountability.

That's because new methods will have to be devised to determine whether these emergency hires are producing well, as teachers. They cannot be judged by the number of their years in service, their teaching credentials or advanced degrees, because all these may be missing.

What they can be judged on is how well their students learn, how well the education process proceeds in their classroom.

These are not as easy to measure as years of service or certificates held, but they are vitally important. And they will become a far greater piece of the evaluation puzzle as the state moves toward a full performance-based school system.

Some of the emergency hires may want to go on, get the full academic training available to teachers and advance in the system. Others, however, may simply want to remain in the classroom, producing bright, educated students.

There must be a way to allow that to happen.

None of this will come easily, of course. The teachers' union will rightfully want to ensure that newcomers — particularly newcomers from nontraditional sources — do not leapfrog past experienced and fully licensed teachers.

Parents as well as school administrators will want to ensure that the right people are teaching the right things to our children.

But out of all this might come a fresh look at how we tackle education in Hawai'i — new perspectives, new people in the classroom and a new approach to the task of measuring how well they are doing.