By Jerry Burris
Advertiser Editorial Editor

When schools superintendent Pat Hamamoto appeared before a special joint session of the Legislature to talk about education, it was considered something of a public relations coup.

The speech, prepared with the help of outside public relations consultants, allowed Hamamoto to retake some of the ground seized by Gov. Linda Lingle in her quest for education reform.

A key element in the speech was announcement of a special education summit, which presumably would continue to flesh out Hamamoto's vision of education change for the state.

Well, the education summit happened. But as it turned out, Lingle — no slouch in the PR department herself — managed to grab the headlines of the day and turn the discussion back to her primary point: a breakup of the centralized statewide school system.

Lingle did so by revealing a poll that said 74 percent of the likely voters in the state want a say in deciding whether we should shift to a system of locally elected school boards.

Atmospherically, this amounted to a ringing endorsement of Lingle's idea. Hamamoto, along with most legislative Democrats, want to retain a single statewide elected board.

There's no question that the Lingle poll was legitimate, in that it was conducted by a well-respected national Republican polling firm, the Tarrance Group. But questions are questions. One gets different results depending on how one asks them.

The key question in the Tarrance survey was this:

"Would you favor or oppose giving Hawai'i residents the right to vote on whether to create locally elected school boards?"

There was an overwhelming 74 percent favorable response to that question. And why not? One assumes most of those saying "yes" were responding to the idea of whether, as voters, they have a "right to vote" on key issues.

In fact, one has to wonder about the 17 percent who opposed this proposition. Were they saying they oppose the right of voters to make a decision on important matters? Probably not. More likely, many within the minority 17 percent group were understanding the question for what it was: A referendum on Lingle's plan to break up the state school system.

Lingle clearly understands that this is not simply a discussion of voter democracy. If the question is put on the ballot (unlikely at this time) it almost certainly would be approved. In general, constitutional proposals tend to succeed at the ballot box.

Interestingly, two other questions on the Lingle survey, on principal accountability and shifting control of spending to individual schools, also received strong endorsement from those surveyed. These are two issues on which the Democrats — at least on paper — are in strong agreement.

The lesson here is that the debate over education reform cannot be resolved through sound bites or clever PR stratagems. It will take hard slogging to educate the public about the real alternatives and what the costs and benefits might be.