EDITORIAL
Schools: Democrats getting ready to punt?

Democrats in the Hawai'i House of Representatives have all but killed, for this year at least, an amendment to the state Constitution proposed by Gov. Linda Lingle that would break up the state Department of Education into local school districts with locally elected school boards.

Many voters will presume that this action is partisan politics at its worst. After all, these same Democrats had proposed something quite similar two years ago.

So the Democrats killed local school boards this year, not on the merits but only because it was a Republican initiative, right?

Well, no. Rather, we think, local school boards is an idea with great intuitive appeal but so little data to back it up that those who have studied it with an open mind over time have become disenchanted.

We'd include ourselves in that number.

State Rep. Roy Takumi, House Education chairman, may be right in the end when he said early yesterday that governance wasn't the real issue. "The real issue," he said, "was getting resources to schools."

But that's where we came in. We're still stuck with chronically underperforming schools. If local school boards may not have been the answer after all, certainly just putting that idea to death isn't going to make things better.

What do Democrats propose instead? It looks as if they're getting ready to punt — that is, to toss the question to the voters since they can't solve it themselves.

They seem to be preparing to offer up a palette of half-baked amendments before the voters — amendments that they're clearly not ready to stake their careers on. Without strong recommendation or compelling evidence on these amendments, voters would be left to throw a dart blindfolded.

Voters can't revise or amend these proposals. They can only vote yes or no.

That's no way to reform education.

Democratic lawmakers on Friday night kept alive amendments:

• To expand the present Board of Education from 13 to 17 voting members to make it more geographically representative. We can't imagine anyone thinks this will improve schools.

• To establish a local school board at every school — a misleading proposal to tart up the present School/Community-Based Management councils.

• To give board members even more control over what happens now in schools. Why do Democrats think even more micromanagement by politicians will make things better?

• To allow 16-year-olds to serve on the board. It may make sense to have a student's perspective on the board, but this amendment would make it theoretically possible to have a board composed entirely of teenagers.

Thank goodness all of these proposals require a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate to get on the ballot in November. That's especially important; if a super-majority of lawmakers can't recommend a proposal, then the voters shouldn't be bothered with it.

We expect that when lawmakers put amendments on the ballot, they do so not because the electorate has a right to input, but because they strongly believe they are viable solutions.