ISLAND VOICES
Against change at all costs
By Rep. Colleen Meyer
Assistant minority leader finishing her fourth term in the state House of Representatives
Superintendent Patricia Hamamoto says that proposals to put less money in administration and more money into the classrooms would cripple our schools.
Are we going to trust the opinion of a 20-year veteran of the very Department of Education that has already crippled Hawai'i's public schools?
Hamamoto's commentary reflects her desire to stay in power, and the related Democratic effort to maintain the status quo, by calling any major educational reform irresponsible and untested.
What is irresponsible is to continue to run our schools the same way that the state has for the last 40 years. She says that studies must be performed before Hawai'i decentralizes its school system. Isn't 40 years of failure to produce desired results enough to realize that our system is not working?
Hawai'i is the only state in the nation that has one centralized education system. Why? Because 49 other states recognize that this method leads to unwanted separation between administration, parents and teachers — separation that encourages corruption and mismanagement.
Just this year, in a report to the Legislature by the joint Senate-House investigative committee to look into the state's compliance with the Felix Consent Decree, auditors revealed grave examples of mismanagement and corruption in the DOE. In one case, over a quarter of a million dollars was spent on laptops for staff positions that were not filled. Even more disturbing, members of the DOE told the committee they could not account for the whereabouts of all the laptops.
In an internal audit requested by Hamamoto herself, the DOE's own auditor found 38 instances of mismanagement and misspent funds, claiming the majority of these problems were due to DOE administrative errors.
On a separate occasion, the state legislative auditor attempted to review the DOE budget books and instead gave up, saying that the DOE's numbers were so inaccurate that the DOE itself could not provide reliable reports on its operational spending.
Hawai'i spends more than $1.4 billion on education and one has to seriously ask, what does Hawai'i have to show for it? In the latest College Board tests, Hawai'i public school seniors scored below those from all other states where over half the seniors took the test.
If a publicly traded corporation were run like the DOE, complete with poor performance, corporate malfeasance and corruption, the company would go out of business, if it wasn't first investigated for fraud by the SEC.
Hamamoto also claims in her opinion piece that the DOE budget is allocated in five spending categories (actually seven), and posits that EDN 300, "State and District Administration," is the only category that pays for DOE administration and it makes up only 2 percent of the budget. Therefore, she says, proposals to cut administration in half and send the money to classrooms would save only $15 million.
Administrative costs, in fact, are being paid for throughout the other areas of the budget. Millions of dollars in administrative funds are hidden throughout the DOE budget, which is why many teachers were frustrated recently when Superintendent Hamamoto said the DOE could not afford to pay for bonuses promised them in a state-negotiated contract.
They too smell something fishy. Superintendent Hamamoto is either seriously uninformed or is purposely misleading the public.
For many years, Republicans have promoted a decentralized school system, but unfortunately, not enough of our Democratic counterparts have followed. We look at the failures of a 40-year-old system and search for solutions that offer dramatically new approaches. We seek solutions instead of excuses.
