Hawaii's class time thin even before cuts - Hawaii News

Let's see the data on how many DOE teachers and administrators send their own children to private schools. Lacking an investment in the quality of education children receive in the public schools because they are not part of the community, these teachers/administrators will then seek to minimize their efforts and time spent working. It is no mystery why the teachers bailed out on instructional days rather than "development" or "professional" days, it is a way to meet the furlough mandate with the least labor; they can still attend lots of days when the kids are not there and receive full pay. The public schools in Hawaii function mainly as social control agencies and have a minimal role as educational ones. Lowest math and reading scores among the states and now the fewest instructional hours/days. No wonder the streets abound with slippah-slapping, big gulp-sucking, obese, ignorant kids.

enufalready wrote:

Let's see the data on how many DOE teachers and administrators send their own children to private schools. Lacking an investment in the quality of education children receive in the public schools because they are not part of the community, these teachers/administrators will then seek to minimize their efforts and time spent working. It is no mystery why the teachers bailed out on instructional days rather than "development" or "professional" days, it is a way to meet the furlough mandate with the least labor; they can still attend lots of days when the kids are not there and receive full pay. The public schools in Hawaii function mainly as social control agencies and have a minimal role as educational ones. Lowest math and reading scores among the states and now the fewest instructional hours/days. No wonder the streets abound with slippah-slapping, big gulp-sucking, obese, ignorant kids.

Enuf, you long paragraph was right on. You could have saved a lot of time by just saying our students just went from dumb, dumber to dumbest. The fact that public school teachers don't even trust the system to send their own kids to public schools is a quite a statement.
We are a joke. In 10-20 years, I would love to know how the students of the "Furlough Fridays" period ended up. High ranking state employees or union bosses?

You want Sports AND and education? Get with the local program. Circuses and bread (and or rice), thats' what Hawaii nei wants.

the kid in the photo is wearing a tank top?

The bureaucratic malaise of the BOE and DOE results of decades of one-party Hawaii Democratic control that we all know encourages and cultivates voter apathy so as to allow that party to continue to manipulate and funnel resources into pockets of its selected bosses and cronies.

Take a look at the citizens that have "given up" and do not vote to toss these bums out of office, but try to "fit in" and "gain the approval" of these essentially corrupt officials in a corrupt system.

The BOE and DOE is purposefully short-changing the mass of students, to insure most end up stupid, so they end up as undereducated, underpaid, working stiff pawns of the Union bosses who act no different than Generals in a corrupt Third World Country.

That's right, Hawaii. Give up. You are all a bunch of losers and short-changing your own future PROVES you are willing to eat your own in order to continue to drive down the road in your foreign Toyota or Lexus with a "I'm local" or "Save the Aina," while complaining about the US economy, at the same time seeing no problem with Democrat hacks and Union stooges telling the rest of us what to do.

In Hawaii, Halloween does not just fall on October 31st, it falls on everyday the Democrats in power pretend they have no control over their invention of the BOE and DOE that designed this cheating of the future to insure their prodigy control the destiny of the less fortunate.

Dis dirty rats politicians always put"Education" first on their promises,but is a big fake because they only care what thier friends whant ...,and then Hawaii keikis last.Edu cation you dirty rats"must"be first and you parents "must" make sure it becomes the first thing they take care.Wake up Hawaii!!!!-----<see who dis dirty rats "first"things to do are?ask questions!!!!------>Do no trust dos politicians at all.

The local class system is perpetuated through a social tradition of private schools, combined with compulsory attendance laws and a government monopoly of public schools. Poor families have no choice over the quality of their children’s education, while more affluent families choose schools with a reputation for quality curriculum and instruction: the top school pick for white families is Punahou, Hawaiians send their children to Kamehameha Schools and Japanese prefer Iolani. This preference is not a racist tradition (except for the fact that Kamehameha’s admission policy requires a quantum amount of Hawaiian blood), but more likely a family tradition. There are no achievement gaps between races in these private schools: all turn out well-educated graduates. Within the public school body that remains after the "skimming" of children into private schools takes place each year, Japanese and Caucasian public school students rank highest and Hawaiians and the mixed salad hover at the lowest rung of the achievement scale.

Read the caption to the photo. It says: "...U.S. policymakers are pushing in increase class time..." Isn't that supposed to be "pushing AN increase IN class time"? Looks like the caption writer and the editor are a couple of examples of students who didn't get the education they needed. On the other hand, maybe this is just a case of the newspaper trying to fit in with the general population.

"the top school pick for white families is Punahou,"

Thanks for the racist and inaccurate comment Class Warfare. Have you ever been to the Punahou campus? Do you have any personal knowledge of the Punahou student population? In reality, Punahou's student body reflects the ethnic diversity of Hawaii. The same is true of Iolani. Trying to portray either school as "whites only" or "Japanese only" is so ridiculous that it invalidates anything else you have to say. Parents choose both schools for their children based on the quality of education, not because either one caters to one ethnic group or another. Yes, it is true that you have a constitutional right to say whatever you want no matter how stupid. But maybe you can do the rest of us a favor and not exercise that right in public.

The whole DOE is a case study in mismanagement. We should just go to a voucher system. As the choice of the recent furlough days suggest (all teaching days were chosen, not one administrative day), it is really about the teachers and administrators, not the students.

Since 18% of Hawaii kids are already going to private school (second highest in the nation), the DOE is getting 100% funding for only 82% of the total population they should be serving, and now, as the article says, they already have the lowest number of teaching days. And to that you can add the worst test scores. So my questions are:
Where is all the money going?
Why is there absolutely no accountability?

I think everyone knows the system is a joke.

If the DOE can't do the job, find somebody who can. It is time to get serious about a voucher system. Our system stinks. We are funding a losing operation that will never change from the inside out. We have to start demanding some changes.

Hawaii is losing wrote:

The bureaucratic malaise of the BOE and DOE results of decades of one-party Hawaii Democratic control that we all know encourages and cultivates voter apathy so as to allow that party to continue to manipulate and funnel resources into pockets of its selected bosses and cronies.
Take a look at the citizens that have "given up" and do not vote to toss these bums out of office, but try to "fit in" and "gain the approval" of these essentially corrupt officials in a corrupt system.
The BOE and DOE is purposefully short-changing the mass of students, to insure most end up stupid, so they end up as undereducated, underpaid, working stiff pawns of the Union bosses who act no different than Generals in a corrupt Third World Country.
That's right, Hawaii. Give up. You are all a bunch of losers and short-changing your own future PROVES you are willing to eat your own in order to continue to drive down the road in your foreign Toyota or Lexus with a "I'm local" or "Save the Aina," while complaining about the US economy, at the same time seeing no problem with Democrat hacks and Union stooges telling the rest of us what to do.
In Hawaii, Halloween does not just fall on October 31st, it falls on everyday the Democrats in power pretend they have no control over their invention of the BOE and DOE that designed this cheating of the future to insure their prodigy control the destiny of the less fortunate.

You are RIGHT ON THE MARK!...... But people don't want to hear the truth because that would mean taking a stand against the corrupt 'machine'- it would mean having to spend time and energies (and money) to fight against the corruption. Individually, that would be hard to do, but if the Hawaiians worked together, they would have a fighting chance. Of course, the fear of Union reprisal (and loss of jobs) is a great motivator to stand back and do nothing..... not many courageous people in Hawaii. Those that finally 'see the light' pack up and move to the Mainland.

Wow, I knew that Hawaii's school hours were less than some mainland schools but just 771 hours? Sheesh, and the school system is going through furlough on top of that? I really feel bad for the kids of Hawaii. The world is getting more and more competitive and if education is not valued, the kids will be very much handicapped in competing for quality jobs. I really hope things get turned around in Hawaii. There's a lot of good and kind people I left behind there.
How is the quality of public education in Hawaii as compared to the mailand? equal, better, worse? If so, how?

Hummm... I was wondering why the Hawaii summer vacation was so short. Because your school days are shorter. Next, I looked at the national hourly averages above and see that California, where I live (wish I lived in Hawaii!), averages less than Hawaii. Well, I don't know. I think our kids go to school long enough. They get tired. Would hate to make them hate school.

Local in Rio Rancho NM wrote:

Wow, I knew that Hawaii's school hours were less than some mainland schools but just 771 hours? Sheesh, and the school system is going through furlough on top of that? I really feel bad for the kids of Hawaii. The world is getting more and more competitive and if education is not valued, the kids will be very much handicapped in competing for quality jobs. I really hope things get turned around in Hawaii. There's a lot of good and kind people I left behind there.
How is the quality of public education in Hawaii as compared to the mailand? equal, better, worse? If so, how?

Local - article from the Hawaii Reporter (while a few years old, still valid):

Nationwide, a failed public school system has provided the impetus for theoretical proposals and valiant efforts to establish charter schools and vouchers as the chosen methods of reform. These attempts can be likened to salmon swimming upstream, where the stream is the force of unions and status quo administrators protecting their turf, and the salmon, surprisingly, are not the parents of children in failing schools, but economists, businessmen, attorneys, think tanks, and the federal government. In the current system, principals and teachers are the lemmings, given orders to perform but none of the resources by their superiors and their union bosses. Edmonton Superintendent Angus McBeath explains it this way: "Always remember that Education is, first and foremost, an employment scheme."

It's not that parents have not heard that the Department of Education is a failing, top-down bureaucracy filled with waste, fraud, corruption, struggling teachers and students struggling to hold on. However, when parents send little Kimo and Keli to school, they see only a smiling teacher welcoming them at the door. Parents attend open houses with classrooms filled with cute little projects and lots of happy faces. Children bring home good grades.

Parents do not know that those grades are meaningless in a statewide education system that has no curriculum, no standard grading scale, and vague standards. Hawaii's parents often find out only after their children enter high school and receive the results of their college SAT/ACT tests that they have been duped and their children robbed of an education that will enable their acceptance to college. Approximately 26 percent of all adults 25 and older in Hawaii have 4-year college degrees.(2) And yet, in 2002 only 58.9 percent of all Hawaii seniors who had entered high school as freshman in 1998 graduated.

Individual student results don't matter much to politicians, because they and the general public perceive Hawaii's centralized education bureaucracy to be superior to mainland models. They believe the system is equitable. Funding for schools is not based on property values; therefore, it is perceived by the public that rich communities receive the same resources as poor communities. The desire for equity appears stronger than the desire for quality in a culture seemingly conditioned to accept whatever little bit they get. A quick comparison between Kaiser High School in Hawaii Kai and Nanakuli High School on the Leeward Coast will reveal severe inequities in terms of both facilities and resources, but the myth of equity, continually perpetuated by the media, influences public perception.

Hawaii's Department of Education is "the biggest business in the state," according to its superintendent. Indeed, this statewide agency is one of the top 10 largest school districts in the country, which include L.A. Unified, Chicago and New York City, with NAEP scores ranking at the bottom with California, Mississippi and Louisiana.

The question must then be: if the DOE is a "business" as well as a service of government, would applied principals of business management improve student performance? What are the benefits of decentralizing and what form should it take?

Endless deliberations and proposals before the Legislature, Board of Education, and community forums to reform public education and improve student outcomes continue to miss the point: The bottom line is 1) schools must be allocated money and the power to make their own decisions 2) decisions must be transparent to taxpayers money must follow the child and parents must have choice where to send their child to school and 4) principals must be held accountable for their decisions. The goal of public education must be student achievement. Any other discussion is a smokescreen disguising the employment scheme mentioned above.

Highly centralized, top-down businesses or agencies traditionally have had to reform or die. When an organization becomes overly centralized it cannot compete. Entrepreneurship is choked as local businesses are told what to do, what and how much to buy whether these decisions suit local needs or not. Who has not experienced this in Hawaii in mainland-based department stores full of heavy winter sweaters and coats that go unsold or in furniture stores that stock bulky pieces that would consume the pint-sized rooms of local homes?

Statistician and quality management guru W. Edwards Deming, noting America's management problems in the 1980s, said, "The problem now is not mass production. The problem is quality." World attention then focused on Japan's success in producing quality products at a lower price. The Japanese had implemented Deming's Total Quality Control, a customer-driven product planning process designed to continuously improve products and services in anticipation of the changing needs of the marketplace.(6)

UCLA Professor William Ouchi, in his book Theory Z: How American Management Can Meet the Japanese Challenge (1981) described the characteristics of Japanese companies that produced high employee commitment, motivation, and productivity. Meanwhile, U.S. government responded to failing American businesses like General Motors and Chrysler by pumping millions of dollars into them. Ultimately, however, companies had to adapt and become more efficient at meeting customer's needs. Theory Z stated that if workers were given responsibility and authority, they would respond with creative ways to maximize their productivity. This approach considered employees to be experts in how best to perform their tasks.(7)

A successful business operates as optimally as its resources will allow with respect to its goals -- a concept known as bounded rationality. Restructuring a centralized organization into autonomous sub-units allows greater flexibility to meet the demands of the local market with greater efficiency. As a result, the multi-divisional, or M-form, is the dominant business structure, because it outperforms the U-form or top-down, centralized model. While extensive studies on business organization models validate this finding, no systematic study on the effect of school system organization and management was ever done.

However, a soon-to-be-published comparative study between centralized and decentralized school districts by Professor Ouchi at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, as well as his new book entitled Making Schools Work: A Revolutionary Plan to Get Your Children the Education They Need, to be published by Simon & Schuster in September 2003, offer compelling evidence that the current paradigm of formal organization is universal and applicable to school districts.(8)

Unlike businesses, most public schools operate as monopolies and have no need to compete or improve performance. Taxes fund government schools with ever increasing budgets and ever declining results. No incentive to perform exists, except perhaps for teachers and principals to tow the line as they climb the career ladder into higher pay in district and state administrative jobs.(9)

Hawaii's centralized school district uses a funding methodology to individual schools called Enrollment Ratio Formula (ERF). Amounts are allotted based on enrollment and student types, which correlates into numbers of staff, such as teachers, paraprofessionals and librarians. ERF restricts a principal's control over funds and limits decision-making on number and type of staff, money spent for teacher training, books and curriculum. This system creates incentives for increasing staff, instead of encouraging performance outcomes. Highly paid centralized jobs can be awarded under this system to those who will respond with political loyalty.

A new system of budgeting that is taking hold in school districts around the country and in Canada known as Weighted Student Formula (WSF) allows money to go directly to benefit individual schools. WSF is successfully used in Edmonton, Seattle and Houston. Funds are "block granted" to each school on a per-student allocation basis and weighted to reflect the number of "categorical" funds for which the student qualifies. Students may choose any school they like and the funding follows the child.

As a comparison, Houston Independent School District is very similar to Hawaii's Department of Education. It has 208,672 students, a $1.16 billion budget and 288 schools. Houston per pupil expenditure is $5,558. Hawaii's public school system enrolls 180,000 students, has 261 schools and a $1.5 billion budget, expending $7,626 per pupil based on average enrollment or $8,167 based on average attendance per student. (10) The difference is that Hawaii appropriates staff versus dollars under ERF while Houston employs WSF, allowing funds to flow directly to individual schools. Houston principals control 58.6 percent of their budget, while Hawaii principals control only 4 percent.

Under WSF, principals become the CEOs of their schools. Superintendents take on the role of coach in a decentralized district. Close supervision is not needed, because budgets and expenditures become transparent … to the penny. Every dollar saved can be kept at the school.

Principals would no longer be unionized. Instead, they would work under 4-year performance-based management contracts. A direct correlation could then be made between executive decisions at the school and performance outcomes.

WSF Benefits Teachers

By allowing funding to follow each child, the percentage of dollars flowing directly to individual classrooms in the form of higher teacher salaries, benefits, paraprofessionals and aides, substitute teachers and classroom materials would increase.

The Hawaii Department of Education currently spends approximately $600 million per year on teacher salaries or about 40 percent of its general fund appropriations. Los Angeles Unified School District spends only 45 percent of its resources in the classroom. In Edmonton, which uses WSF, 60.5 percent of its resources remain in individual classrooms. In Edmonton, teachers' pay is 51.8 percent of the total budget. Less expenditure on centralized administrative salaries allows for a higher proportion of the budget that may be spent on classroom teacher pay.

Decentralization, especially in districts using a Weighted Student Formula, results in improving achievement across every ethnic group and every grade. In decentralized districts using WSF, African-American students under Title I low-income program score well above the district average for both reading and math. In contrast, students with the same demographics in centralized systems perform far below their counterparts. Houston Independent School District consistently outperforms Los Angeles Unified School District on SAT 9 tests by 10 percent in all areas. This phenomenon exists in spite of the fact that Los Angeles recycles its SAT tests every 3 years and Houston does not.

If the goal of schools is to allow each individual student within the system the resources that will allow them to be competitive and successful, funding must be based on individual student needs. For example, in Seattle, a high-needs student with autism may carry the highest weight with over $25,000 per year in funding, while a middle-class child under no special categorical need may carry the weight of $2,800 per year. Schools would also receive a flat-based allocation to allow small schools to meet their costs.(12)