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An Amendment for Education
Aloha everybody!
For what it’s worth, here’s my current thinking about amending the constitution to improve education. My humble thoughts are based on the research I’ve done over the past couple of months (though admittedly not enough to make me an expert) and logic.
First of all, what I think needs to improve is the education that students experience. I don’t think that can be operationalized any differently than standardized tests. True, tests don’t tell you everything, but there is nothing else that tells you anything about the quality of education. I’m not interested in making schools more democratic, just more successful.
Next, in order to improve the education that schools offer, you need accountability. Accountability means one person is identified as having done the right thing or the wrong thing, with appropriate consequences to that one person. And that happens to be exactly what we are missing. If you have accountability, you don’t need more democracy, you don’t need more decentralization, you don’t need a community of scholars.
Accountability is easier to attain on a smaller scale, but only because it is easier to monitor performance on a smaller scale. So decentralization can improve education by making it easier to maintain accountability. But decentralization without accountability is meaningless.
In addition, in the case of Hawaii, decentralization might improve the chances for accountability simply by virtue of the fact that it breaks up the monolithic power bloc a little bit.
So here is suggestion number one: decentralize the school system. But do it in a workable way. Make the counties responsible for the schools, because they already have governments and can make the transition. Besides, the constitution already allows the state to put counties in charge of services. And there is already support for this idea among well established government officials. This is appropriate for a constitutional amendment.
Don’t try to put complexes or schools in charge of themselves, because there is no already existing mechanism for setting up independent governance systems for them. The result would be chaos. You would have everybody and his uncle trying to take over.
Even worse is creating committees to make decisions. Because that totally destroys accountability. You would not only have everybody and his uncle, but also their pit bulls trying to take over.
A big obstacle to accountability is the HGEA. However, in my opinion, there is nothing appropriate that a constitutional amendment can do about the HGEA. Maybe the legislature could do something about them, but not a con-con. So forget about doing something about the unions.
To have good accountability, each school principal should have his/her goals assigned by the district, and have the power and resources to accomplish the goals; combined with monitoring and consequences from the district. But this is not appropriate for a constitutional amendment. This should be up to the counties. If the state mandates things like this, it will still be a state system. Let the electorate of each county do something about the accountability of their own schools.
Finally, funding should still be statewide.
So in summary, the counties should be put in charge of schools, while retaining state funding, period.
Peter, with all due respect, I think it’s an empty exercise to ask us to formulate the amendments ourselves. That should be done by constitutional attorneys or others with expertise at legal language. What the con-con should do is decide what practical changes to suggest for the society, and then ask lawyers to word the proposed amendments for them.
Aloha!
For what it’s worth, here’s my current thinking about amending the constitution to improve education. My humble thoughts are based on the research I’ve done over the past couple of months (though admittedly not enough to make me an expert) and logic.
First of all, what I think needs to improve is the education that students experience. I don’t think that can be operationalized any differently than standardized tests. True, tests don’t tell you everything, but there is nothing else that tells you anything about the quality of education. I’m not interested in making schools more democratic, just more successful.
Next, in order to improve the education that schools offer, you need accountability. Accountability means one person is identified as having done the right thing or the wrong thing, with appropriate consequences to that one person. And that happens to be exactly what we are missing. If you have accountability, you don’t need more democracy, you don’t need more decentralization, you don’t need a community of scholars.
Accountability is easier to attain on a smaller scale, but only because it is easier to monitor performance on a smaller scale. So decentralization can improve education by making it easier to maintain accountability. But decentralization without accountability is meaningless.
In addition, in the case of Hawaii, decentralization might improve the chances for accountability simply by virtue of the fact that it breaks up the monolithic power bloc a little bit.
So here is suggestion number one: decentralize the school system. But do it in a workable way. Make the counties responsible for the schools, because they already have governments and can make the transition. Besides, the constitution already allows the state to put counties in charge of services. And there is already support for this idea among well established government officials. This is appropriate for a constitutional amendment.
Don’t try to put complexes or schools in charge of themselves, because there is no already existing mechanism for setting up independent governance systems for them. The result would be chaos. You would have everybody and his uncle trying to take over.
Even worse is creating committees to make decisions. Because that totally destroys accountability. You would not only have everybody and his uncle, but also their pit bulls trying to take over.
A big obstacle to accountability is the HGEA. However, in my opinion, there is nothing appropriate that a constitutional amendment can do about the HGEA. Maybe the legislature could do something about them, but not a con-con. So forget about doing something about the unions.
To have good accountability, each school principal should have his/her goals assigned by the district, and have the power and resources to accomplish the goals; combined with monitoring and consequences from the district. But this is not appropriate for a constitutional amendment. This should be up to the counties. If the state mandates things like this, it will still be a state system. Let the electorate of each county do something about the accountability of their own schools.
Finally, funding should still be statewide.
So in summary, the counties should be put in charge of schools, while retaining state funding, period.
Peter, with all due respect, I think it’s an empty exercise to ask us to formulate the amendments ourselves. That should be done by constitutional attorneys or others with expertise at legal language. What the con-con should do is decide what practical changes to suggest for the society, and then ask lawyers to word the proposed amendments for them.
Aloha!
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