Morgan Freeman doesn't work for the State of Hawai'i Department of Education.

If he did, maybe Gov. Linda Lingle's big fantasy about happy, shiny decentralized schools with limitless community support behind a principal who knows how to stretch a dollar, motivate demoralized children and lift up weary faculty could come true. But in the real world, schools need money. Buildings need to be repaired. Toilets should, ideally, flush.

Hawai'i's public schools are becoming more and more like those no-hope inner-city institutions of so many Hollywood movies:

Meryl Streep and the violins.

Edward James Olmos teaching calculus.

Ted Danson teaching chess.

The two classics with Sidney Poitier.

And "Lean on Me," in which Freeman plays a no-fear principal who takes on violent drug dealers, small-minded school board members, misguided parents, battle-worn teachers and forsaken students to whip Eastside High into test-clearing shape.

In real life, the character Freeman played quit his job the year after the movie came out and became a motivational speaker.

In the movies, the buss-up schools get the big turn- around because one person magically turns on the power of everyman. The school bureaucracy is always the bad guy. The kids are just misunderstood. And everyone sings an uplifting song in the end.

But here, the most consistent lesson Hawai'i's public school system provides our kids is how to make do. When kids excel, it's because they have have internalized the credo of "despite."

That may be admirable and poetic, but Hawai'i children deserve to start out better than ever-underdogs. For too many kids, school is the one place of sanctuary and meaning in their whole chaotic lives. Mom is an ice head waiting for a bed in a treatment facility that still doesn't exist despite Lt. Gov. James "Duke" Aiona's meetings and speeches. Dad is a black eye looking to land.

Expecting these families to pull their neighborhood schools out of despair is like expecting a patient to run the hospital. Let the pros do their jobs. Expecting any community to run the schools is asking too much of the already over-burdened working class.

Lingle is throwing a crumb to the public schools by allocating just $63 million of fix-it to cover $525 million of broken. She wants to have $110 million in the rainy day fund? It's pouring in the schools and the roofs are leaking.

Maybe if Morgan Freeman did work for the DOE, he'd take his megaphone over to the fifth floor and start yelling about playing politics with our children. And then there would be the victorious music montage of armies of contractors descending on every public school and fixing and fixing and fixing.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.