The Advertiser's Community Board recently met with Pat Hamamoto, the state superintendent of schools, to talk about improving public education in Hawai'i.
Board members were able to speak candidly and question Hamamoto about the quality of Hawai'i's public schools under her jurisdiction. After that meeting, our board members were asked to tell us what they felt should be done to improve Hawai'i's public schools.
Here are their views:
Craig Y. Watase
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| Craig Watase |
We will never see a truly productive, creative and inspired educational work force unless the DOE and Hawai'i State Teachers Association decide to align pay with performance.
They've been talking about it for years, but contract negotiations could be seen as evidence of a different agenda.
Everyone from the janitor to the superintendent should have written goals and objectives that are measurable. Internal and external customers should be identified and evaluations should come from those customers as well as management. A percentage of base pay should be awarded only to those that achieve those goals and more compensation to those that overachieve the goals.
Those who underachieve should make less than base pay.
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| Schools superintendent Pat Hamamoto talked about the quality of Hawai'i's public schools with The Advertiser's Community Board.
Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser
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This is done every day in the private sector. In the 1980s, Xerox Corp. was the first to implement this type of management called Total Quality Management, tying pay to performance for everyone from secretaries to the CEO. The result was a company that came back from the brink of bankruptcy to become the first U.S. company to win back market share from the then-overwhelming Japanese competition.
Closer to home, several years ago a local bank's mortgage lending business was made up of salaried loan officers. New management came in and put everyone on commission. The bank's mortgage business went from nothing to $2 billion in just two years.
Incentive pay can be implemented at several levels. For example, every teacher can get a bonus if the school achieves a certain target. Or bonuses can be paid to teachers by grade level, encouraging teamwork. This also puts pressure on teachers that may not be carrying their load, since their performance can affect everyone's bonus.
"Pay for performance" also means "fired for nonperformance." The superintendent noted that she has four teachers that are being fired (and all are in arbitration). That's four out of 13,000!
Are all our teachers that good, or is the HSTA protecting teachers who are less than mediocre? If all our teachers are good, they won't be afraid of pay for performance.
I've heard that such a system can't be implemented until there is agreement on what the goals are or how they are measured. Aren't there employee evaluations already being done? Doesn't the DOE currently have goals or objectives?
While we have built more schools and increased the number of teachers and staff, the DOE still serves the same number of students as 30 years ago. Just throwing money into pay is proven to be ineffective. Pay must go to the performers!
People find ways to succeed when there are incentives to do so.
Ultimately, parents need to understand that they have the biggest incentive of all and they must take ownership and responsibility for each child's education.
— Craig Y. Watase of Niu Valley is president of Mark Development Inc., an affordable-housing developer and property manager.
Edgar Ramones
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| Edgar Ramones |
There are many ways to keep improving our public schools. Small strides have been made in that direction, but obviously a lot of work needs to be done. There is no single way to improve our public schools.
A child's life in school can be somewhat improved, but as soon as that child goes home, there is no control as to what goes on there.
Children are with teachers six to seven hours a day. Still, as teachers, we can only do so much. What are we looking to improve? Academics? Social behavior? Many children come to school with a lot of baggage.
Some things that might affect a child's ability to learn could include drugs in the home, a lack of proper supervision and support, and other situations at home.
We can talk about smaller classroom sizes, more pay or improving facilities or teachers' qualifications. But for a teacher to get any of these things, they have to go to the principal.
From there, it goes to the next person in the chain of bureaucracy. There are so many people in between that things get lost along the way.
Personal agendas get more focus than important agendas as a whole. When issues are brought forward to government leaders, that is when it gets sticky. Things are stuck at a standstill. This is where the strongest change can be made to help improve our public schools.
Changes need to start at the top. Our state does not move fast enough. Issues keep dragging on and on within the system. The Legislature does not work a full year, so things that fail to get addressed during the session are held at a standstill until the next year.
We as a society are so laid back that government does not have the incentive to evolve. The only times I see things actually getting done are during an election year or when something horrible happens and there's pressure to act.
Society will always keep changing. With these changes, new problems and issues will arise. Schools as well as government need to keep evolving to meet these changes head on.
Issues that were not addressed 10 years ago are starting to surface in higher numbers, and the system still has not changed to accommodate these challenges.
Academics will never change. Children will need to learn the basic things that they have to learn in school. I can go on and on about why things happen and don't happen. It's not a great thing to look forward to as an educator, but I feel that teachers can truly make an impact on the life of a child.
— Edgar Ramones of Mo'ili'ili is a teacher at Star of the Sea Early Learning Center.
Henry E.K. Lee
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| Henry E.K. Lee |
While there is little hope of it ever happening, it would be nice if we could get politics and political meddling out of public education.
— Henry E.K. Lee of Kane'ohe is a retired Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard supervisory equipment specialist.
Steve Doyle
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| Steve Doyle |
Hawai'i taxpayers and voters seem to be uninvolved in the electoral process, with the nation's lowest voter turnout at 50.4 percent. But when the subject of public education comes up, there is no shortage of anguish and concern.
Parents want a high-quality education for their children. Teachers and students want an environment that is safe and conducive to learning. And everyone wants to know that the Department of Education's $1.9 billion budget — the single biggest line item in the state budget — is being properly administered.
Yet some basic no-brainers are not being addressed by the DOE.
An important case in point is air conditioning in the classrooms. Teachers and students forced to swelter in classrooms that frequently average 90 degrees cannot be expected to perform anywhere near their capabilities. I would suggest that commuters driving to work not use their automobile air conditioners and then sit in gridlock traffic for an hour.
Now, imagine every day in school trying to learn under similar conditions.
One explanation, state schools Superintendent Pat Hamamoto tells me, is that Hawaiian Electric Co.'s power grid could not support the additional demands of individual classroom air-conditioners.
Right. HECO can supply the Ko Olina Resort's needs but not those of classrooms in older leeward schools?
If it's too expensive, then how about cutting 10 percent of DOE's administrative budget and apply that money to the air-conditioning costs?
In neighborhood board meetings around O'ahu, the Honolulu Police Department, the Honolulu Fire Department, the Department of Land and Natural Resources and other agencies send their representatives to answer questions. The DOE does not always send a representative. This bureaucratic behemoth apparently feels it is unaccountable to the communities that pay the taxes and send their children to public schools.
When Gov. Linda Lingle campaigned on "home rule," her intention was quite clear: Create local boards of education that would be more accessible (read accountable) to parents and teachers on a local level. Yet when this plan was introduced, the DOE monster went into high gear.
The result was that certain powerful Democratic legislators would not even allow the proposal to be placed on the ballot, thereby effectively saying to Hawai'i voters that they would be allowed no input. And we wonder at voter apathy.
These are just two examples of DOE intransigence that seem to be symptomatic of the mind-set on Miller Street. The tragedy of all this is that while the grown-ups play turf wars and ego games in air-conditioned offices, it is Hawai'i's keiki who are being harmed. We cannot call back past graduated classes and tell them "we've fixed the problems."
The problems need fixing now. Public scrutiny of the DOE and mandatory transparency in its operations will be crucial to the fundamental improvement of our public education system.
But just in case the DOE and certain legislators forget: The voter is still the boss.
— Steve Doyle of Hale'iwa is a contributing writer to sailing magazines.
Meheroo Jussawalla
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| Meheroo Jussawalla |
Public schools in Hawai'i are diverse in their standards and teaching practices, and some of them, such as those in far-flung areas like Lana'i and Moloka'i, may suffer lack of teaching facilities as well as school buildings. Some have higher rates of computer literacy and others have none, and this inequity needs to be rectified even though the cost may be high. There are corporate donors who could be tapped for this purpose.
Teachers, especially substitute teachers, need to have greater incentives to give their best and to stay on in the public school system, because there are other avenues offering higher incomes.
The cost of living is high in Hawai'i compared with other states, so this must be factored into their incentives. School labs for science and teaching of math are woefully neglected despite the best efforts of the DOE and the Board of Education.
While the governor is advocating early-childhood education, there still needs to be more support from the Legislature to implement this goal. The task is challenging, funding is pitifully short and no one agency can be held accountable for providing all the needs of special education and of charter schools.
Is there private-public cooperation being devised to improve the school system and to make its benefits more equitably distributed? What is the role of parents in meeting these challenges?
— Meheroo Jussawalla of Honolulu, an emerita senior fellow at the East-West Center, is the author of 15 books dealing with information technology.
