EDITORIAL
Hawai'i Poll: Parents stress school basics

People representing themselves as education reformers have placed great emphasis in recent years on the importance of changing how schools are governed.

Three years ago, Hawai'i Democrats looked closely at a reform package that called for the statewide school board to be broken up into a number of boards representing smaller districts.

The Democrats quickly lost enthusiasm for that idea, which is intuitively attractive but unsupported by convincing research data. But the concept was quickly picked up and championed by Gov. Linda Lingle and state Republicans.

The Democrats, meanwhile, found new answers in giving principals greater control over their schools and in an idea that had been enacted years earlier but never empowered — School/Community-Based Management councils.

And both parties seemed eager to embrace a relatively new concept: school spending that would be weighted relative to the actual needs of individual students.

Hawai'i residents, a new Advertiser Hawai'i Poll suggests, have followed these debates closely. Rather large numbers of them are prepared to support a specific governance solution, the poll suggests, although substantial numbers remain undecided.

But while they aren't entirely sure whether governance solutions aren't just shuffling management deck chairs, they seem strongly convinced that successful education begins in the classroom.

This emphasis was strongly supported by The Advertiser's statewide survey of 605 Hawai'i residents, conducted March 24 to 27 by Ward Research Inc. of Honolulu. The margin of error is 4 percentage points.

The poll found that people firmly believe in two basic concerns: that providing enough textbooks for every student and lowering class sizes in the early grades would significantly improve education.

"The deeper message from the poll," writes Advertiser education reporter Derrick DePledge, "may be that school governance is not the priority" with parents. "When asked to rank several ideas, people gave much lower marks to local school boards and giving principals more control over spending than to practical things such as textbooks, class size and school repair and maintenance."

This should be a clarion call to those who are now deep into the debate over school reform. The passionate battle over various forms of school governance is important, and it has focused public attention on education.

But as the Hawai'i Poll suggests, the real focus should be on what matters most: textbooks, class size, decent school facilities and other changes that intensify the quality of the interaction between individual teacher and individual student.