Posted on: Friday, November 28, 2003

EDITORIAL
School finance study adds little to debate

With all due respect for the people who produced it, a new report prepared for Gov. Linda Lingle on public education spending in Hawai'i adds little in the way of clarity to our state's deepening debate on education reform.

There's no denying that the Department of Education can use all the financial analysis its critics can offer, and there's no disguising some of its grosser shortcomings.

Indeed, the DOE itself has long complained about some of the problems mentioned prominently in the report by professors Bruce Cooper and William Ouchi. Examples are its lack of control over school spending in such other bureaucracies at the departments of Accounting and General Services, Health, Budget and Finance, and more; and the maddening lack of accountability as the school board, the superintendent, the governor and the Legislature all jockey for power over the K-12 education system.

But this is not a report designed to shed light on a troubled system in the hope of producing new ideas for improving it. Rather, it very clearly is a report written to advance an existing agenda — that is, Lingle's advocacy of division of the school system into smaller districts with seven elected boards.

In that respect, the report is seriously misleading and deeply flawed. The report presents data that support the argument that the present system is broken, but that do little or nothing to support the claim that smaller districts will fix it.

The DOE is correct in complaining that the report offers a number of glaring distortions. These include an apples-and-oranges calculation to produce an inflated per-pupil expenditure figure, an unfairly chosen number for the construction budget, and a grossly understated number of teachers counted as directly involved in classroom education. There is also a clumsy comparison of "central office" vs. school-level costs. As a minor but typical example, the electricity bill, while paid by the DOE and counted as a "central office" cost, is for electricity used by individual schools.

These distortions help Cooper and Ouchi to the conclusion that the Hawai'i public school system has a swollen administrative budget, and that less than half of all education spending ends up in the classroom. Yet a number of other studies acknowledge that Hawai'i's administrative costs are among the very lowest in the nation.

What is not helpful for the cause of education reform in Hawai'i is the manipulation of statistics to support ideological views. The idea of dividing Hawai'i's public schools into seven districts is one that was intuitively charming upon first hearing, but one that is rapidly fading under closer examination.

Those inclined to think that the Cooper and Ouchi report has revived that idea may not have read it closely.