Posted on: Monday, October 6, 2003

EDITORIAL
School reform is not change for change sake

If anyone thought Gov. Linda Lingle had lost her enthusiasm for a campaign promise to break up the centralized state-controlled public school system in Hawai'i, think again.

Lingle is pushing ahead on the idea, with the creation of a high-powered committee of business, education and other leaders whose job it is to put a local school board constitutional proposal on the ballot next year.

Lingle says she deliberately left out most of those who might have a stake in the status quo, which is an understandable — if politically misguided — decision.

While there is much to recommend the idea of giving greater autonomy and power to local school administrators and the community they serve, simply dissolving our current statewide system is no silver bullet.

In fact, over the years, many states have looked admiringly at Hawai'i's statewide, centralized, standardized system.

To be blunt: "Change" is not necessarily reform.

That said, there are ways in which our centralized system can be fine-tuned to produce better results. In many cases, one-size-fits-all does not work.

Lingle's primary consultant on this effort, Hawai'i-born author and professor William Ouchi, captured it well when he said of Hawai'i's 258 public school principals: "We're going to need 258 entrepreneurs. We have 258 bureaucrats."

That fits with our belief that principals should be given far more authority, along with more money, to manage schools on a performance-based basis.

That does not imply we should simply "blow up" the current system and hope something better emerges. Hawai'i has much to be proud of in its single, statewide system. The goal is to make that system work, not eliminate it.