By Jennifer Hiller
Advertiser Education Writer

Gov. Linda Lingle, in her State of the State address this week, mentioned an often-repeated belief: that public school teachers across the state are sending their own children to private school in droves.

"The public knows, and we should not be afraid to say it — Hawai'i's public school system is broken," Lingle said. "The people closest to the situation, the teachers and the administrators themselves, reportedly send their own children to private schools at a rate dramatically higher than that of the general public. And I suspect that the same could be said of business leaders and of politicians."

While the claim is often made, it's hard to find anyone who has such numbers.

Both the Department of Education and the Hawai'i Association of Independent Schools have said they do not have such a survey.

Danielle Lum, communications specialist for HSTA, said she remembers hearing some numbers, maybe about a decade ago. She thinks they may have come from a Hawai'i Opinion Poll on Public Education or the national Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll. Or not.

"Hawai'i as a whole sends their kids to private school at a higher rate than the national average," Lum said.

About 15 percent of Hawai'i's students — nearly 33,000 of the 216,000 school-aged children in Hawai'i — attend private schools. It's one of the highest rates in the nation, although Louisiana, Washington, D.C., Rhode Island and Connecticut reportedly have a higher percentage of their children in private schools.

About 12 percent of children nationally attend private schools, HAIS officials said.

Greg Knudsen, DOE spokesman, said he knows there are public school teachers who send their children to private schools. Surely there also are private school teachers who send their kids to public schools.

"It's like an urban legend," Knudsen said. "I've never actually seen the numbers."

Test results

First it was mid- to late-November. Then December. Then January.

Now the latest from the Department of Education is that test scores from last spring's standardized test will come out in early February.

The delay has come from confusion over the data that will show not only how schools and grade levels performed, as in the past, but how smaller groups of students performed.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, test data has to show how students at each school scored across ethnic groups (using Census categories of white, black, Native American, Hispanic and Asian-Pacific Islander) and how students who are high poverty, special education or limited English proficiency scored against the whole school.

Apparently the test-scoring company put some children into the wrong categories, so the Department of Education and school principals have had to go over the results to make sure a student who is, for example, taking English as a Second Language classes gets placed in that category and not into the special-education grouping.

Two of the seven sections come from the Stanford Achievement Test, a nationwide barometer of academic performance. Other portions are designed in Hawai'i.

Reach Jennifer Hiller at jhiller@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8084.