Hawai'i schools face textbook shortage

By Jennifer Hiller
Advertiser Education Writer

At Roosevelt High School, science department chairwoman Jennifer Williams has 24 textbooks for 60 students in her sophomore biology classes.

Jason Agbayani, 15, peruses the Modern Biology textbook for his 10th-grade biology class at Farrington High School. Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser

"If you look at the different levels in our department there are 13 or 14 different courses, so your turn for new books only comes up every 13 or 14 years," Williams said. "That is not reasonable."

But it's a typical situation statewide, where textbooks travel from student to student, class to class, year to year in a circle of recycling and sharing, but rare ownership.

The lack of textbooks in Hawai'i classrooms has become one of the loudest complaints about the school system. But with textbooks typically costing $60 to $90 each, quieting the critics would cost the state tens of millions of dollars.

The Advertiser surveyed high-school biology teachers statewide for a glimpse of the textbook situation. What the paper found was that six out of the 10 teachers contacted don't have enough textbooks to assign each student their own; some of them don't have enough copies in their classroom sets to allow students to check out books to take home overnight to study.

The slide in textbook availability started about a decade ago. But with the rise of the Internet and computers as classroom tools, teachers say they have been able to cobble together updated science information for their students, and rely more than ever on labs and other hands-on activities. While they still need textbooks, some teachers say they need laboratory supplies even more.

Once the standard of school learning, the textbook in many cases has gone the way of the microscope — a nice tool to have in the classroom, but too expensive to let students carry home.

At Farrington High School, students have the rarest of luxuries: $30,000 worth of new Modern Biology textbooks, enough copies to have a classroom set and give each student a copy to bring home. "Treat 'em nice," teacher Pat Kefling-Wood instructs a class of 10th-graders. "They're $65 apiece."

Leilehua High School received Farrington's old biology texts. Published in 1991 and written in the late 1980s, they talk about cloning as a technology that may one day be possible, Kefling-Wood said. At Kaiser High School, the older biology textbooks have references to test-tube babies as new technology.

Alternate learning methods

With a shortage of books, teachers have had to become resourceful, using more handouts, articles and lab experiments to teach.

Roosevelt opened in 1930, so the teachers benefit from a long accumulation of science equipment. Classes have skeletons and skulls for demonstrations and enough microscopes to go around.

"I have a wealth of equipment from years gone by," Williams said. "There is no way with my budget I could buy them. In our dream world we all have textbooks for everybody, but our teachers do a very good job with what they have."

Legislation that would give the Department of Education extra money for textbooks and computers has failed in the past.

"I really think it's criminal that we don't provide the necessary textbooks for students," said Rep. Cynthia Thielen, R-50th (Kailua, Mokapu), who has sponsored legislation that would require adequate textbooks. "We cripple the teacher's ability to teach and the student's ability to learn."

Thielen said the DOE should make textbooks a budget priority and direct resources in that area.

State education officials say that principals have money in their budgets to purchase books if they want to, but acknowledge that with limited dollars the texts often come at the expense of other materials.

At Kaiser High School, it's a choice each year between buying new biology textbooks for each student or buying lab supplies. That's why only the advanced-placement biology class and three general biology classes have textbooks that are up to date, and those are 1998 editions. The rest of the students in biology classes use textbooks printed in 1990 and 1996, said Tanya Ashimine, a biology teacher at Kaiser for 11 years.

Still, students at Kaiser are better off than others; each student has a book to take home. "We use every scrap of money we get to order books," Ashimine said.

Private schools have long expected students to pay for their own textbooks, but public schools cannot force parents to pay.

According to the latest Hawai'i Opinion Poll on Public Education, done in 2001, more than half of those surveyed opposed having the public schools start a fee system for textbooks. The most favored option was increasing efforts to have private companies and individuals contribute to the public schools.

Last year the Joint Venture Education Forum, a partnership between the military's Pacific Command and the Department of Education to improve Hawai'i schools, conducted a survey of military families to gauge their opinion of the public school system. Textbooks were the number one need cited by parents.

Col. Thomas Gibbons, director for manpower personnel and administrative support, said it is the top education issue that he hears from families. And while the JVEF has directed much of its grant money toward textbook purchases, it cannot keep pace with the need.

Assuming that textbooks cost $60 — a lower-end cost for a high school text — buying four new books for every regular-education high-school student in the state would cost $10.8 million.

But for educators, the idea of improving education goes well beyond textbooks.

Principal Lisa DeLong at Kahuku High and Intermediate School said textbooks shouldn't drive instruction. "Textbooks tend to cover breadth over depth and push the inch-deep and mile-wide type of curriculum, often use homogenized language, draw conclusions for students instead of allowing them to do the critical thinking, and don't teach students how to manage, interpret and responsibly use information," she said.

Kahuku biology teacher Amy Swiderski said textbooks are a good resource and if each student had one, she could cover more material. But, she said, textbooks aren't essential. In her general biology class she has a set of 40 textbooks, published in 1998, that were a recent gift from Kamehameha Schools. Reading is done in class. Students can check out a book but must return it the next day.

"Textbooks are good as a supplement and for background, but I think it's important for students to keep up to date on what's happening and be able to take information, decipher it and use it," she said.

But she said it would be nice for students to have the texts for a reference tool at home.

William Ellis, a Kahuku senior, agrees. "Personally I enjoy using a book," Ellis said. "I think I learn better that way, but I also really enjoy having other methods of learning."

Textbooks vs. computers

Some say the reliance on textbooks is generational. To parents, textbooks remain a significant part of learning because of their own experiences in school, said Aloha Coleman, principal of Waialua High.

The academic landscape has expanded to include a range of resources that were technologically impossible a few years ago. "Don't get me wrong, we need textbooks," said Coleman. "But the textbook is a tool, like other tools — microscopes, computers, and labs — that we now have in the biology classroom."

Arthur King, director of the Curriculum Research Development Group at the University of Hawai'i, said it's that change in educational thinking that has created troubles across the textbook industry.

"The textbooks are competing against computers," King said. "For every dollar for textbooks a dollar is being spent for computers."

With some large states such as Florida, California and Texas having statewide textbook adoption policies, King said publishers have been forced to tailor their formerly national texts to meet regional needs. That has driven textbook costs higher.

School districts nationwide have cut back their textbook purchases, King said. In Hawai'i, the decline in textbook purchases started in the mid-1990s when the state's economy faltered, he said.

Still, for biology teachers such as Melanie Toloumu at Waialua High, the textbook is fundamental, even if there isn't enough money available to assign each student a book. "Although there are many labs that help with learning and that the students enjoy, I still believe that the content is what drives biology. You can't have a lab that's not based in the textbook. It needs to have a foundation."

Nanakuli High and Intermediate School biology teacher Joye Hanabusa relies on a classroom set of 30 biology books that cost $1,800. They are new — copyright 1998 — but Hanabusa doesn't have extras to loan out. "I don't like to rely too much on them because every child can't take a book home," Hanabusa said. If given the choice today between new books and other needed supplies, Hanabusa also would opt for supplies.

Most schools, unable to purchase too many texts at once, have developed purchasing plans.

With about 700 freshmen taking biology every year, Waipahu High School has had to find creative solutions. Because of the constant updating, science and history books take priority over language and English texts. "We try to upgrade as we go along," said principal Patricia Pedersen. In the meantime science classes have incorporated project-based activities, such as robotics in physics, and Internet research.

The new Kea'au High School in Puna on the Big Island has a good number of current biology texts — most published in 1997, 1998 or 1999 — because the state just allocated money to get the school running. But even Kea'au does not have enough books for every student to take home.

The school opened in fall 1998, and Steve Stephenson, a veteran teacher who is Kea'au's science department chairman, calls Kea'au "a relatively rich school," at least for now. Officially, Kea'au adopted a book replacement schedule that calls for the science texts to be replaced next year, but replacing the biology texts alone would cost about $15,000, he said. "I already know for a fact we do not have the budget to do that; there's no way that can happen," he said.

And even when science books are new, they can't provide a complete curriculum.

At Maui High School, teacher Betty Lou Kala is thrilled to offer her biology students 2001 textbooks. There are enough to assign a text to each student for the year. While the new books were the best available at the time they were purchased, they are not perfect. Missing is information on some new technologies, such as gene therapy, she said. "I'm always on the lookout for new material. It's important to keep up with the changing time," Kala said.

Andrew Snow, science department chairman at Kaua'i High School, has enough texts for all the kids in all his classes, and enough extras for aides, special-education teachers and to loan to students who have misplaced theirs. "We're using a 1992 edition of BSCS Biology. It's 11 years old, but the fundamentals of biology are still the fundamentals of biology," he said.

At Farrington, which has a huge number of immigrant children —many still in their first years of learning English — students rely heavily on texts. Kefling-Wood said students need the texts to learn to read, but that's not the only issue facing schools.

"People want it to be easy: If we order textbooks we will solve our problem," Kefling-Wood said. "It's not that easy. It's having a good breakfast for kids, a good home for them to go to and the kids being able to speak English. We go so far beyond textbooks in what we need. The solutions are not going to be as simple as every kid having a book. But if a book is required, then we need to be able to get one."

Staff writers Eloise Aguiar, Kevin Dayton, James Gonser, Will Hoover, Timothy Hurley, Suzanne Roig, Jan TenBruggencate and Catherine Toth contributed to this report. Reach Jennifer Hiller at jhiller@honoluluadvertiser.com.