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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Monday, October 14, 2002

SECOND OPINION
'Facts' about our education?

By Cliff Slater

When the associate director of the Hawai'i Educational Policy Center (HEPC) at the University of Hawai'i holds forth in these pages with "a few facts to help our debate on education" (Oct. 3), one has a right to expect that these are facts to be trusted. However, when he said that, as a percentage of state and local taxes, other states spend twice as much as Hawai'i on public education, I was skeptical.

I checked; he's wrong.

We spend 21.9 percent of tax revenues on education versus an average of 27.2 percent for all other states (stick with me here, it gets exciting later). On this basis, we spend a little less (not half) than other states but solely because their average state and local taxes are 20 percent lower than Hawai'i's.

Were our taxes to be reduced by 20 percent, our education spending percentage (and tax burden) would fall in line with other states.

Thus, when we look at the $6,694 we spend per student, we find we are average among the other states. Note also that our state auditor found that when all expenditures were included, we spent $6,998 per student, which is far more than what the Department of Education reports spending.

There are two lessons here. First, state accounting is a mess. You can get at least a half-dozen numbers for spending per student, depending on whom you ask. Just imagine if investors got a half-dozen answers for Bank of Hawai'i's profits, depending on whom they asked. Investors would abandon the stock, citing such uncertainties as chaos, which is precisely what the state's accounting is.

Second, reports written by people who depend on the education budget for their bread and butter can be relied upon to find (guess what?) that there is not enough bread and butter.

In any case, much as it is counterintuitive, education spending does not correlate strongly with student outcomes. Comparing states' per-student spending with student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, we find that Utah, for example, spends less than any other state — $4,579 per student — yet is in the top third of student scores. Rhode Island and Wyoming have the same scores as Utah, yet spend twice as much. There is a lot more at play than just money — such as management.

Then HEPC tells us that we have a very high percentage of our total education staff serving as teachers. In other words, there is no bloated bureaucracy.

These people may be labeled as teachers, but they certainly do not appear to be teaching in the classroom. Teachers who have been around for 30 years tell me that they have not seen any change in class size. Yet, even though we have exactly the same number of students as we had 30 years ago, we have 3,500 more teachers.

Add to all this, the recent blistering report by the state auditor on the millions of dollars of missing DOE equipment and inventory and it boils down to gross mismanagement at the DOE. One cannot blame the present superintendent, who has spent her career working under totally inexperienced and incompetent managers. Who was she expected to learn from?

When IBM's board had this kind of a mess on its hands, it went outside the company to Nabisco, a biscuit manufacturer, to hire Lou Gerstner as CEO. Not being a technician, he had to use his superb management skills, including an ability to learn through his staff, to determine what needed to be done to turn IBM around.

One would think that with a $1.4 billion budget, 240 locations, 18,000 employees and 180,000 customers, just a few experienced and hardheaded managers might come in useful.

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