Posted on: Tuesday, May 25, 2004

EDITORIAL
Federal 'No Child' law cannot fit all cases

By many accounts, Hawai'i has among the highest rates of "failure" to meet the stiff standards of the new federal No Child Left Behind education law of any school system in the country.

From one perspective, this is an alarming statistic, as Hawai'i Congressman Ed Case has pointed out. He has asked federal education officials to conduct a review of our schools to determine why we are not keeping up with the mandates of the new law.

Now, Hawai'i must be careful not to plead "uniqueness" as an excuse for failure to do what is best for our children. Every school district in the nation is having trouble of one kind or another with the No Child law.

Still, we applaud Case's interest. If the inquiry leads to greater federal financial support for the many mandates built into the new law, it will be more than worth the effort.

In fact, we suspect that part of Case's interest is precisely that: to demonstrate to Washington that it cannot simply mandate new approaches to education without the cash to back it up.

There is another way to look at Hawai'i's rather minimal success rate, however. This has to do with the fact that each school district is able to decide for itself the standards it will be measured against.

If a state has high expectations and high standards, it stands to reason that it will experience a higher "failure" rate. As long as this doesn't result in unduly onerous sanctions, there is nothing wrong with setting the bar high.

But another problem facing Hawai'i is the nature of its single statewide school district. What you get is a homogenized system in which the best-performing schools are lumped in with the least-performing.

Hawai'i also has a relatively high percentage of students who come from immigrant backgrounds where English is not their native language.

The way to look at Case's request for a review of our schools is that it is not an effort to find out why we are "failing," but rather to point to the ways in which we can better succeed.

That formula will include more money, yes. But it should also include flexibility in the assessment process that recognizes that in education, as in all things, one size does not fit all.