ISLAND VOICES
Education reform misguided
By Joseph Gedan
Our Legislature will soon take up the issue of the underperformance of our public school students. In this regard, David Shapiro in his Jan. 7 commentary joins with Gov. Linda Lingle in endorsing two approaches to improving the educational achievements of Hawai'i's public school students: forcing school principals out of their union, and replacing our school system with seven local school boards.
Neither of these proposals addresses the issue of helping our students reach their potential.
There are three factors that are the primary determinants of educational achievement:
• The first is the extent to which the child's parents value educational achievement and create a home environment conducive to academic success.
Interested parents oversee what their children are doing in school, communicate and cooperate with teachers and take steps to assure that their child is following through on assignments, is well-nourished and has enough sleep.
Such parents have children who are more successful in school than parents who treat the school as a baby-sitter and are indifferent to what their child is doing.
What do the principals' union and the number of school boards have to do with parent attitudes and behavior?
• The second important factor in educational achievement is the effectiveness of the teacher.
Teachers must have a sufficient mastery of their subject matter and, more importantly, a mastery of the skills and tools of effective teaching to students of all backgrounds and abilities. Someone must have the authority to reward the best-performing teachers and retraining teachers inadequately prepared or moving them into other careers. In athletics, you don't hold the coach responsible if he isn't allowed to set the game plan and determine who plays and who does not.
Our principals do not have that authority.
Improving our teacher corps is an issue with the teachers' union, not the principals. The principals' union is not what is preventing us from having a more skilled corps of teachers, and there is no reason to think six more school boards will do anything to attract the best candidates to the profession, support our strongest teachers and either retrain or eliminate ineffective teachers.
• The third important factor is financial resources.
If we are to attract the best into the profession, we might consider paying teachers as much as bus drivers and perhaps more. This takes money. Decreasing class size takes more teachers, and this also takes money.
Smaller class size is likely to result in improved educational achievements because it increases the amount of time and attention that teachers can give to students at all levels of achievement.
What do the principals or their union or the number of school boards have to do with this?
To advance her proposals, the governor offers vague generalities, rather than evidence of a relationship between the solutions she proposes and the problems to be solved.
Hawai'i's statewide single-district school system is considered by educational professionals as the most progressive and is the envy of the nation. Are we to abandon it under the political mantra "local control"?
The governor and the Legislature must make hard decisions. Scapegoating the principals and the application of political dogma to change the system are not the answers.
Joseph M. Gedan is a retired U.S. magistrate, a former researcher with the Hawaii Legislative Reference Bureau and former staff attorney for many legislative committees.
