EDITORIAL
DOE budget: huge test for lawmakers

It has all the earmarks of an impending train wreck:

• Gov. Linda Lingle has promised to "redirect 50 percent of the money currently spent on the DOE's centralized bureaucracy" to the classrooms and local schools.
• The Department of Education wants an increase of $32.8 million in the 2004 budget and $28.1 million in 2005, over this year's $1.3 billion base, for, among other things, such "centralized bureaucracy" needs as school buses, collective bargaining, compliance with No Child Left Behind and computer upgrades to handle increased reporting obligations. That's in addition to the huge drain of Felix compliance.

Not much further into the future is Lingle's promise to establish seven locally elected school boards, with the obvious "centralized bureaucracy" expense of providing infrastructure for each.

We believe Superintendent of Schools Pat Hamamoto has argued convincingly that there's no great repository of "fat" in the DOE. Indeed, centralization gives it substantial economies that it would lose if it were broken up.

It will be up to Lingle to identify excessive central bureaucracy with great specificity. It won't do simply to direct the DOE to make cuts based on the assumption that there's that much "fat."

Lawmakers must ensure that they're hearing facts, and not ideological wishful thinking, before they make substantial changes.