ISLAND VOICES
We must alter how we govern schools

By John Kawamoto

The Advertiser is right in saying that the decline in test scores among Hawai'i's public school students is no cause for panic (Oct. 4 editorial). However, it is wrong to argue against a change in school governance.

The Advertiser makes the unsupported statement that changing the way things are run will not result in dramatic changes in test scores. In any other organization, changes in outcomes are often achieved by a change in the way things are run.

Granted, there is no guarantee that changing education governance will improve the quality of education. But changing governance by decentralizing decision-making would provide a sound organizational foundation that would allow improvements to be made.

Decentralization relies in large measure upon the belief that teachers, school principals, parents and interested community members are the ones who are best able to make the decisions about how schools should be run.

In the private sector, large corporations began to decentralize in the 1980s in an effort to ultimately improve customer satisfaction. The idea was that those employees who were closest to the customer were best able to decide what the customer wanted. Those large firms that were not successful in decentralizing did not survive.

As a government agency, Hawai'i's Department of Education has been insulated from forces in the private sector, and the DOE is still highly centralized. It is an organizational relic that has been kept alive, not by satisfied customers, but by funding that is forced upon us in the form of taxes.

Instead of a change in governance, The Advertiser urges us to "stay the course." Perhaps forgotten is "A Nation At Risk," a report issued by a presidential commission on education in 1983. The report contains the following oft-quoted lines: "If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves."

Twenty years ago the condition of education nationwide was already a cause for alarm. Since then, Hawai'i has been, unfortunately, staying the course. Twenty years is long enough.

John Kawamoto, a former legislative analyst assigned to education issues, lives in Kaimuki.