Reorganization of Hawai'i Public Schools (K-12):

• The Problem as I see it:
  • Disenfranchisement of the public from the decision making process of local schools.  This results in:
    • Long feedback response systems between complaints and solutions.
    • Lack of high level concern over local problems.
    • Lack of local concern over high level, system-wide problems.
  • Top-down academic planning that creates an environment where many teachers feel alienated from the teaching process.  This results in:
    • Centralized dogma that is not flexible enough to deal with variation in teaching styles and local community needs.
    • Standardized text books that may not be consistent with the interests of parents and teachers.
    • Periodic changes in styles of teaching that are dictated to teachers and require retraining time that could have been used for teaching students.
  • Strengths of local community, ethnic, and other social groups are rarely used as critical elements within the school system.  This results in:
    • Weird perceptions/misconceptions that anyone who does not speak English as their first language is not as intelligent as those who do.
    • Compartmentalization of certain kinds of knowledge about local cultures into specific grades or language classes.
    • Inadvertent racial profiling/negative biases within national examinations and national text books that are selected.
• Outline of a Solution:
  • Empower local schools and parent groups to make their own decisions
    • De-centralize the state's public school system.
    • Award budgets to each school based upon the following criteria: number of student hours taught each quarter; number of square feet of functional building space; number of square yards of playground, athletic field and other general usage space.
    • Establish a budgetary system wherein principals propose annual budgets that must be approved by both the teachers of the school and the parents of the children attending the school.  The budget should be based upon reasonable predictions of state funding support in the above three categories
    • Encourage local schools to be creative in their budgetary process, including offering incentive pay (above the level of Unionized agreements) to attract needed teachers or to reward particularly meritorious teachers.
    • Give local school administrators the power to hire and fire teachers without centralized control. 
  • Re-organize the state level administration for four minimal functions:
    • Administration and distribution of State, Federal and Other funding for local schools. This should include teacher, administration, and staff payroll and benefits. (This area needs a great deal of work in order to reduce errors and improve response times to changes.)
    • Solicitation and distribution of special funding grants for facility maintenance and improvement.
    • Curriculum evaluation and teacher training programs.
  • Create a competitive environment for top-down teacher training programs
    • Training program concepts should be developed based upon teacher requests and state/national mandates.
    • Training programs should not be mandatory but should be offered ONLY if it is determined that a significant number of teachers are truly interested in the training.
    • Training programs offered should include competitive bids from national training organizations and teacher organizations.
    • Teachers who are successful in their own school should be empowered to develop training programs for other teachers based upon their own success.
  • Reduce State government control over schools to ONLY approval of an annual budget with the following parts.  The first part (support per student) should be the majority of the budget and the source of local school salaries, etc.
    • Support per student per year (based upon number of teaching contact hours, excluding "in-service" time and holidays).
    • Support per square foot of functional building space.
    • Support per square yards of playground, athletic field and other general usage space.
    • Centralized administration.
    • Non-State-government fund raising.
    • Curriculum evaluation and teacher training programs.