By David Shapiro

The fight in the Legislature over public school reform isn't about the Democratic plan vs. the Republican plan.

It's a more fundamental issue of whether to start fresh and dismantle the status quo, which even the schools superintendent admits has brought Hawai'i's schools to the point of obsolescence, or give the status quo one last chance to heal itself.

Superintendent Pat Hamamoto's speech to the Legislature was billed by sponsoring Democrats as being about change.

But those applauding Hamamoto looked like a last-gasp reunion of the status quo — officials who had decades to make our schools work, but didn't.

There were the former governors, who promised to make education their top priority, but failed to advance the ball of student achievement against the unmovable bureaucracy Hamamoto heads.

There were the members of the state Board of Education, who have proven virtually useless in making our schools better.

There were the lawmakers who have dithered year after year, deaf to public pleas for schools that provide children a fair chance in life and bolster a sound economy.

In the gallery were the principals and teachers whose unions fight change, insisting that interests of school employees take precedence over the needs of the system and its students.

It's an establishment scared to death of an aroused public so fed up with foot-dragging that they upended 40 years of local history and elected a Republican governor who wants to blow the status quo to smithereens by breaking the state's centralized schools into local districts.

Hamamoto's judgment must be questioned for allowing herself to be used by the Democrats as a political prop to upstage Gov. Linda Lingle's State of the State address. She needs to be able to work with both sides to be effective.

But she is clearly the bright bulb of this bunch, and showed courage by inviting accountability for results if political powers give her the ball to run with and get out of her way.

If Hamamoto had an open field in which to run, and decent blocking in front of her, the inclination would be to give her a chance.

We know from painful experience, however, that her political compromises make it far more likely she'll be held at the line of scrimmage by the governor, Legislature, school board and unions dragging behind her.

Perhaps it's time for a new game plan. Democrats in the Legislature thought so the year before Lingle's arrival when they voted for the same changes the governor now seeks — and congratulated themselves on their forward thinking.

Decentralization may or may not be the answer, but the argument Hamamoto and others use against it — that local boards add another layer of bureaucracy between the state Board of Education and the schools — is bogus.

The state school board as we know it would be gone. So would the centralized bureaucrats who write the policies all schools must follow, create the paperwork that distract schools from teaching and call the endless meetings that waste the time of school officials.

Look at it this way: If decentralization really adds size and power to the bureaucracy, why does the bureaucracy fear it so much?

It's senseless for politically motivated legislators to once again kill Lingle's proposed constitutional amendment early in the session without a fair hearing.

Why not put it on the ballot as Lingle suggests, allow all sides their say in full and open debate, and let voters decide whether or not the status quo deserves one last chance?

David Shapiro can be reached at dave@volcanicash.net.