What Will It Take to Fix
Hawai‘i's Schools?
A comrehensive solution

Mary Anne Raywid
    
August 21, 2002

In February of this year, education policy specialist Mary Anne Raywid wrote a legislative bill called the "Education Reform Act of 2003." She wrote the bill in response to an open invitation issued by the state House Education Committee. Her bill went nowhere.
     Last month, on July 17, Raywid gave the prestigious, annual Shiro Amioka memorial lecture at the UH-Mänoa College of Education. Her speech, "What would it take to fix Hawai‘i’s schools?" echoed her legislative proposals and was warmly received by the SRO crowd of administrators, faculty and students packed into the Krauss Hall lecture room. The clear-eyed speech has since resonated as a "call to action" among Hawai‘i educators and others concerned about the state’s future.
     Raywid, professor emeritus at Hofstra University in New York, has been an adjunct professor at UH-Mänoa for the past six years. Author of numerous books and articles pertaining to education reform, she has also, over the years, served as president of such national organizations as the Philosophy of Education Society, the Society of Professors of Education and the John Dewey Society for the Study of Education and Culture.
     The version of Raywid’s speech printed here has been edited for length.

     I believe that three kinds of very fundamental changes are necessary if our public school system is ever to work right: changes in commitments and convictions, changes in school governance and one big change in school organization.
     The changes in commitment and conviction need to be dealt with first, because they are most fundamental, with the most pervasive effect. Commitment and conviction pertain to the way we think and feel about things, and the kind of values we place on them.
     Perhaps the most urgent of these sorts of changes needed in Hawai‘i is the development of something like a civic equivalent of ohana — not the intimate one that the word ohana usually implies, but a public one.
     In his book Bowling Alone (Simon & Schuster, 2000), Robert Putnam talks a great deal about the decline of social capital in the United States. What he means by social capital is the "connections among individuals — the social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them." He identifies two kinds of social capital, or connections, linking people: "bonding" and "bridging." Bonding connections are personal ties that hold tightly knit groups together. This is the kind that links family members, fraternity brothers, old friends. We can see quite vividly the strong bonding social capital in Hawai‘i. The Islands are known for it.
     "Bridging" connections, on the other hand, establish positive links with those with whom we do not share "bonding social capital." It is the kind that links one group to another. This is the sort of social capital that is declining here (and elsewhere). It is clear in Hawai‘i’s voter-turnout rate, which ranks 50th among the 50 states. It is also clear in the public schools and the weak support they get from the public. When I say weak support, I’m not talking about criticism. I’m talking about how relatively few people really try to do something about the faults they find — that’s what real support would require. The dominance of bonding social capital is apparent within Hawai‘i’s ethnic groups. It is also apparent in gangs among our youth — and among the youngsters and families who disdain as "haole imitators" their fellows who seek to succeed in school.
     Our support for multiculturalism supports the bonding variety of social capital, sometimes creating out-group antagonisms that require bridging, yet undermining the bridging variety of social capital we so badly need. The tolerance we claim is not enough. If we are to operate as a society together, we need bridges from one group to another, not just a willingness to live and let live. The absence of such bridges is evident in multiple ways — in the behavior some exhibit on our highways, in the ways some people break into lines where others have been waiting their turn, in the corruption that is sending an astounding number of our officials to jail. You can’t have a multicultural, aloha-based society without bridging. Building that bridging may be one of the most important things the schools can do by way of citizenship education.
     Two things that are especially important for building bridging social capital in the schools are that they be genuinely user-friendly, and, second, that they be truly open. User-friendly means, for instance, that no one is left standing waiting in the school office while staff chat among themselves; that no parent is given short shrift when he or she comes to see the principal about a concern; that no child is ridiculed or ostracized by a teacher — ever, for anything.
     "Open" means that it should be easy to get information about the schools. The school system certainly should operate under sunshine laws. It should be easy to find out where and when Board of Education meetings are, and exactly what is on the agenda. It should be easy to testify. The information collected by the Department of Education should be treated as the public property it is. When I remind you that it is only within the past two or three years that the DOE has released to the public the actual dropout rates from the schools these citizens pay for — crucial figures in judging a school’s success — perhaps you will understand the changes needed to make information about public schools open and accessible to all.
     Within schools, one of the more promising ways to generate bridging social capital is through service learning programs. Youngsters should grow up with the feeling they’ve got some obligation to the larger community, to making it a better place. I’ve seen kids in such programs operate crucial emergency services, work at renovating homes and ably represent those unable to make their own cases in dealing with predatory businesses and officials. Learning programs not only provide instruction in civic engagement but also inculcate a sense of its basic importance.
     Unless we do these things — and whatever else it takes to build bridging social capital between the schools, their constituents and bill-payers — I fear for public education in Hawai‘i. The growing gap between the haves and the have-nots, and the fact that Hawai‘i’s public schools are increasingly populated by the children of the have-nots, make those who are able to do so less and less willing to pay for public education. Unless we can build some bridging connections to them — through user-friendly schools, openness, service learning and whatever else occurs to us — the pressure on the Legislature to use scarce funds for schools will become less and less. Our public schools have few real champions today. We need to think about how to cultivate them.
     The other part of our culture — our beliefs and norms and values — that we must change to fix our schools is our obsession with control. I’ve never seen large numbers of people so committed to controlling the behavior of others as in Hawai‘i. Some attribute it to the plantation-era oligarchy, while others see it as the legacy of an absolute monarchy. Whatever the cause, it’s an impulse derived from a set of beliefs about the capacity of human beings (other than ourselves, of course) that we must acknowledge and try to rid ourselves of.
     The pervasiveness of this obsession to control is evident everywhere. Consider, for instance, a 25-page bill presented in the Legislature this year to establish an educational accountability system. It specified exactly who was to be accountable for what, how they were to be held accountable, the rewards for successful students, the interventions for unsuccessful ones, how collective professional accountability should be set up and administered, how student achievement should be calculated and how the superintendent should set up the process for designing the system. (I’m not sure what there was left to design, but those who would be involved, and how, were specified.)
     The same kind of tendency can be found in the state Board of Education, in the state and district offices of the Department of Education, and in the offices of many principals. This is most unfortunate, because not only does it sometimes lead to structures of unbelievable complexity to make sure that nobody can goof up or cheat, but it also leads to a docile, compliant and relatively uninvolved work force. The way to get the most effective performance from teachers and principals is to allow them some input about the programs and procedures we want them to be carrying out. (Kruse & Louis, 1997; Rosenholtz & Simpson, 1990; Weiss, 1993)
     It’s as simple as this: People will work to create a world they want and which they have been invited to envision and develop; they’re a lot less willing to work to create a world that’s been forced upon them, like it or not. It is like the difference between romantic love and a shotgun wedding.
     Our preoccupation with control is producing failure. Over the long run, teachers can work on changing it by modeling trust in their judgment of students, and by providing less and less structure as youngsters mature, encouraging them to exercise their minds and their own judgment. Teachers know that you can’t learn to swim without getting in the water. And that you can’t get in the water as long as those in authority keep blocking you from doing so.
     It may take some time for us to modify these fundamental convictions and commitments embedded in the local culture — the control orientation, and the absence of bridging social capital. But there are things we can fix more immediately in schools, largely through governance changes.

Governance changes needed
     We have things in schools put together in the wrong way. You can design an organization so as to make it effective and efficient, or you can design it in such fashion that it is just about guaranteed not to work well. I’m afraid our school system is saddled with this latter guarantee.
     First, we in Hawai‘i have organized our public education system to make absolutely sure it can’t have too much power — enough power, that is, to err or become corrupt. We’ve established a Board of Education, but what power it has seems scant and quite unclear. The BOE can’t disperse funds, or collect them. Whatever policies and priorities it seeks to establish can be overturned or replaced or reordered by the Legislature. And then we’ve made sure that the DOE, which the board supposedly runs, won’t go astray by having eight different executive departments intervene daily in its operation.
     The state Department of Human Resources announces vacancies and processes the hiring of school secretaries, custodians and cafeteria workers. The Department of Budget and Finance determines when and how much of the DOE’s budget can be released to it. The Department of Accounting and General Services controls school facility construction and maintenance. The Office of Collective Bargaining handles the contract negotiations with teachers, school administrators and other school workers. The Office of State Planning is involved in planning locations for new school facilities. The Department of Health is responsible for school health services, including counseling services. The Department of Land and Natural Resources manages the acquisition and disposition of public school lands, and reviews leases for DOE offices. The Department of the Attorney General provides legal review for the public schools, reviewing DOE rules and regulations, as well as proposed waivers submitted by individual schools. (Task Force on Educational Governance, 1991, as updated.)
     Several things are worth noting about this arrangement. One is that since all of these are executive offices whose heads are appointed by and responsible to the governor, the setup makes the governor something of a supra-superintendent of schools. Another is the paralyzing complexity, the maze-like intricacy and the delays that are bound to result from such a setup. And, finally, there are the overlapping jurisdictions, which, as 9/11 so vividly showed, don’t work when you need them most.
     Now, I’m not complaining about checks and balances, the principle upon which our whole governmental system is based in order to prevent one branch of government from tyrannizing over the others. But if one puts the checks and balances in the wrong places, or overdoes them, it is possible to paralyze a public institution. That is what I think we’ve done with the DOE. We complain endlessly (and with good cause) about its inefficiency. But a number of the problems may not originate with the DOE or be curable by it; they may be the result of our firm determination that it shall not go astray, plus our cultural emphasis on hierarchy, spelled c-o-n-t-r-o-l.
     This is not ancient history I’m talking about. This year, humor columnist Charles Memminger noted that our state motto, translated, means "The Red Tape Starts Here."
     Actually, the Board of Education really has very little authority. If the governor is the supra-superintendent, then the Legislature is the supra-board.
     It is in the Legislature that state education policies are really written. And it’s not occasional, as a corrective, or to take care of some singularly overlooked problem. It is constant. To cite just a few highlights, it was the Legislature, not the BOE, that originally adopted School/Community-Based Management (SCBM) and the Comprehensive School Support System. It was the Legislature that adopted A-Plus. It was the Legislature that adopted charter schools — and that has tried to amend its errors in each succeeding session since.
     But it’s not just major bills like these, it’s also decisions like there shall be a vice principal in every school, or there shall be a Hawai‘i State Student Council with exactly three functions and two staff advisors, or music shall be included as an integral part of the core curriculum of all Hawai‘i schools.
     Such legislation not only telegraphs micromanagement at its peak, but it’s also responsible for the arrangements provoking complaints about the size and clumsy operation of the bureaucracy.
     When I first came to Hawai‘i, I thought the Legislature was the solution for public education. I now see it as the problem. One of the reasons why boards of education were created was precisely to move educational decisions as far as possible from the political arena, and to put school policy in the hands of public officials devoting their full-time civic contribution and focus to schools. Such is not the case, of course, with members of the Legislature, even those on the education committees. And one of the things I believe must happen is that, except under truly extraordinary circumstances, education policy must be written elsewhere than in Hawai‘i’s Legislature.
     All state legislatures sometimes step in to correct ills in the schools. Especially since The Excellence Movement was launched in 1983, there has been much more legislative action to raise school achievement levels and establish standards and accountability systems. Legislatures are also involved, sometimes by court order, with school funding. But I assure you that in no other state but Hawai‘i does the Legislature function consistently as a supra-board of education for the state.
     One reason it does so here is linked to our statewide, unitary system of school management and control. If we had a decentralized system with semiautonomous local districts, the Legislature might not be nearly as tempted — nor in such a good position — to keep producing school policy, rules and regulations. This is one of the features of our public schools that makes it such a bad system.
     Here is another: On the Mainland, city schools everywhere are in trouble — not so much suburban schools or small town schools, just those in large urban districts. It’s fairly widely agreed that the troubles stem in considerable part from size. And we’ve created a single, statewide school district very much like a large school district in a city, in terms of governance. Philadelphia is the nation’s eighth-largest school system and one of its most troubled. It has 257 schools — approximately the size of Hawai‘i’s system, which has 255 schools. By virtue of its size alone, the Hawai‘i school system may be just as hard to control effectively as Philadelphia’s. So here we are, gratuitously saddled with the least successful type of educational governance in the country.
     It’s understandable why it is hard to break up a city’s school system and establish separate, autonomous districts within one city. But there’s not a reason in the world why we can’t do that in Hawai‘i. Doing so could solve not only governance problems but also student achievement problems. The evidence is clear that the larger the school district, the lower the achievement levels of students. (Bickel & Howley, 2000; Walberg & Walberg, 1994)
     Why not, then, decentralize Hawai‘i’s oversized single school district by establishing multiple, semiautonomous districts? I say semiautonomous, because I think all schools should be obligated to have their students meet state standards. But, as those who proposed the standards-based education idea have insisted from the start, once you have standards that all are required to meet, that’s all the control you need. You can skip the rules about procedures and what and how to teach, and all the supervision and monitoring.
     Let schools and local districts design their own instructional programs, their own pedagogy, their own organizational structures. The standards provide sufficient control. All you need then is to check that those standards are being met, and to intervene in the interests of improvement if they are not.
     Every school ought to receive a report card from the state. And these should be widely disseminated, not just to those who can use the Internet and somehow manage to translate the elaborate information now posted. Everybody in the state ought to be able to find out how well a school is doing — not only its test scores, but its attendance rates, dropout rates, suspension and expulsion rates, teacher retention rates and how well all of its students are progressing toward graduation.
     If we’re so determined to simplify things down to a single score, then we can do an index that combines all these things (test results, dropout and expulsion rates, etc.). But we don’t need accountability laws and offices to detect and act on this. It ought to be the DOE’s responsibility to collect the data and distribute the report cards, and the superintendent’s responsibility to act on them when that’s indicated. That’s all we need to specify — that’s all the control we need.
     Another place where we can dispense with a lot of elaborate supervision, hierarchy and control apparatus is with principals. Principals are key figures in schools. They make or can break a good school. They need to have a fair amount of authority. But we also need some sort of check and balance where they are concerned. A bad principal can drive away good teachers, kill good programs and make kids and their families miserable.
     One very simple way to make sure of striking the right balance, without a complicated accountability apparatus, is to place principals on four-year performance contracts with reappointment contingent on a vote of confidence from teachers and parents, as well as on student achievement and a supervisor’s judgment.
     (District superintendents, by the way, ought to be placed on analogous contracts, wherein one renewal factor is the judgment of those who are presumably being led by this individual.)
     A final governance measure, which must change if Hawai‘i’s public schools are ever to work, is that their budgets cannot be a brand-new question for fresh decision each year, where one year they contend with street repair for adequate funding, and the next year it’s a swimming pool or a golf course. This not only leads to underfunding, but the arrangement also makes it impossible to do any rational budgetary planning.
     There must be a dedicated revenue stream for schools, which stands as the predictable and dependable source of at least a large percentage of what they need to operate. And a lot more money must go into schools and classrooms than we’re now investing. In the words of a student at Roosevelt High School (Hobbs 2002):

     "I go to a school with no soap in the bathrooms, no toilet paper and no doors on the bathroom stalls. Many classes don’t even have textbooks for students ... and there are books in our library that say ‘someday man hopes to land on the moon.’"

     We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. This is no way to treat our kids, and it is certainly no way to build the sort of future we want for Hawai‘i. Why should a youngster who has been treated so shabbily, and with such disrespect (by an institution we compel him to attend, mind you) feel any obligation to the society that treats him this way?

School change
     I’ve suggested some major cultural changes and half a dozen governance changes that I consider essential to fixing the state’s schools. But even if we accomplished them all, we would not have changed classrooms. In my judgment, everything mentioned is necessary to classroom change, but even collectively they are not sufficient. Thus, to complete my list, I want to propose one more change, pertaining to school size and organization.
     For years we were told that large schools are cheaper and qualitatively better than small ones. There is now a good deal of evidence adding up to exactly the reverse: Small schools avoid a lot of what we now know to be the dis-economies of scale. Small schools do a much better job of enabling youngsters to succeed, especially youngsters who are disadvantaged or at risk. In a small school, the chances of success for such students are exactly double what they are in a large one. (Howley & Bickel, 1999) A careful study conducted in four states confirms that the well-known negative effects of poverty on school performance are halved in small schools. Since the disadvantaged and at-risk now constitute a full half of Hawai‘i’s public school population, downsizing could do a lot to improve school achievement among those who need it most.
     There is at least one more major advantage to small schools that we in Hawai‘i — with the largest average school size in the nation — have ignored at our peril. It is that small schools are far safer than large ones. It appears to be no coincidence that the tragedies at Columbine and Santana occurred in large high schools.
     Where youngsters are not anonymous or marginalized, they are far less likely to get in trouble. In fact, student behavior in general is superior in small schools.
     In Hawai‘i, with the gang problems we’ve got, our large schools are a catastrophe just waiting to happen. I wish we would begin to see that downsized schools are not just something that might be nice, but an arrangement that is crucial for the safety of our children and that will enable a lot of them to pass all those standards tests we’re writing.
     I suggest we do what a number of places on the Mainland are doing: break down our large schools into separate, semiautonomous ones operating within the same building. Let each of these schools-within-schools be designed and chosen by the teachers who will operate them. Let each one have a theme they have selected to entice and engage students, a theme that truly interests kids enough to make them willing to study a full curriculum. (A couple of themes I think would be sure winners here are The Sea, Pacific Rim Studies, a Leadership Academy and a school featuring a "peoples history" perspective on the past and present.)
     I wish Hawai‘i schools would do it and do it right, because this kind of school downsizing may be the best way yet devised to transform schools and their effectiveness, as well as a move crucial to the safety of all of our children and to the prospective success of those kids at risk of nonproductive and noncontributory futures.
     Some of these ideas may sound a bit far out. But I assure you that virtually everything I’ve proposed already exists elsewhere. And I truly believe that if we want to fix Hawai‘i’s schools, these are the sorts of moves we must resolve to make.

References
     Bickel, R. & Howley, C. (2000) "The Influence of Scale on School Performance: A Multi-Level Extension of the Matthew Principle," Education Policy Analysis Archives.
     Hobbs, K., "Legislature Let Down the Students of Hawaii," The Honolulu Advertiser, May 28, 2002, p. A9.
     Howley, C. & Bickel, R. (1999) The Matthew Project: National Report. Randolph, VT: Rural Challenge Policy Program.
     Kruse, S. & Louis, K. (1997) "Teacher Teaming in Middle Schools: Dilemmas for A Schoolwide Community," Educational Administration Quarterly, 33(3), pp. 261-290.
     Memminger, C., "Trojan Horse Anderson Welcomed in Dem Fortress," "Honolulu Lite," Honolulu Star-Bulletin, April 14, 2002.
     Putnam, R. D. (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
     Rosenholtz, S. & Simpson, C. (1990) "Workplace Conditions and the Rise and Fall of Teachers’ Commitment," Sociology of Education 63(4), pp. 241-257.
     Task Force on Educational Governance. (1991) "Who Governs Public Education in the State of Hawaii?" (eight-page handout)
     Walberg, H., Jr. & Walberg, H., III (1994) "Losing Local Control of Schools," Educational Researcher 23, pp. 19-26.
     Weiss, C. H. (1993) "Shared Decision Making About What? A Comparison of Schools with and without Teacher Participation, Teachers College Record, 95 (Fall), pp. 69-93.
     The Amioka Lecture, July 17, 2002.