By Jerry Burris
Advertiser Editorial Editor

Without a doubt, the battle to "reform" our public school system will be the No. 1 political issue of the year.

Gov. Linda Lingle will ensure it. She has launched an all-out offensive to win public support for her plan to break up the state school board into as many as seven smaller, more community-focused boards.

The Lingle administration also is spearheading a new system for funding the public schools that would allot money on a "weighted" basis, so that schools with large numbers of children with special needs would get extra support.

There is considerable opposition to the Lingle plan, much of it coming from teachers and their union, the Department of Education and others, leading to charges that the opposition is simply interested in protecting its own turf and the status quo.

As a result, those who do not like the Lingle prescription (including many legislative Democrats) will have to do more than say no. They will have to offer their own alternatives.

The end result could be quite healthy for our school system. Competition for ideas could produce ideas that might not otherwise see the light of day.

It might even lead to some fresh thinking about what the core problems are in our public-school system.

Is it really the fact that we have a single statewide system? Or is it truly that our principals are in a union? Might there be something more systemic at play here?

Across the country, searches for successful school systems usually emerge in suburban, relatively affluent areas where hefty property taxes and committed parents support and insist on quality public schools.

Randy Hitz, dean of the College of Education at the University of Hawai'i, makes an interesting observation about the Hawai'i school system in that context.

On the Mainland, he says, one tends to find struggling inner city schools and relatively backward rural schools, plus a ring of more successful suburban schools in between. Hawai'i's public schools tend to resemble either inner-city or rural schools, with very few public schools hitting that suburban Mainland mark.

Instead, the suburban school role is taken by this state's successful and popular private-school system. Hawai'i has one of the largest percentages of students in private schools in the nation.

This removes from the public schools a significant proportion of bright, achieving youngsters and their committed, involved families. If you blended our

private-school population back into the public-school system, Hawai'i's statistics automatically would shoot up.

In fact, if the school reformists truly wanted to get radical, they might simply suggest abolishing or outlawing the private-school system here. Like that, you'd see improvements and a legion of parents demanding even more.

That's obviously not going to happen. But some kind of out-of-the-box thinking will be needed this coming year if the education debate is to be more than a blame game and a fight among adults over power and control.