Draped over the entrance to the Nawahi School is a piko, a woven, garlandlike decoration made of plants and vines. To the children who enter this school, the piko--a Hawaiian word that means navel--symbolizes a connection to past generations.
Each morning, the 77 students in this grade 7-12 program in Hilo, Hawaii, gather here and request--through traditional Hawaiian chants--an invitation to enter the public school.
It’s a ceremony rich with meaning, but one that would not have taken place in the state school system before 1986. That’s the year the legislature, under intense pressure from Hawaiian families, decided that children in the 50th state could once again be educated in their native language, as well as English.
Teaching children in Hawaiian had been forbidden for nearly a century, since the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898.
But since the change in the law, use of Hawaiian in classrooms has spread quickly through a language-immersion program, in an effort to preserve the once-dying language and the culture of the islands. There are now about 1,700 students in the state, including preschoolers, who speak, write, and conduct all of their daily school activities in Hawaiian.
Students at the Nawahi School raise chickens, pigs, and fish out back. They also grow taro--a root vegetable used to make poi, a traditional Hawaiian dish.
And at a private preschool in Hilo that conducts classes in Hawaiian ,macadamia nuts and leaves from indigenous plants are used for hands-on activities, and children sing Hawaiian songs, accompanied by the ukulele.
The first senior class of Hawaiian-immersion students--all five of them--will graduate in the spring, and all of them plan to attend college.
To founders of the program, that’s an encouraging sign that native Hawaiian children--who are more likely than others in the state to be poor, to have low test scores, and to be at risk of dropping out--can succeed.
“One of the statistics that we should be bragging about is that we haven’t had a dropout yet,” says Puanani Wilhelm, a specialist in charge of the immersion program at the Hawaii Department of Education.
Students in the program perform roughly on par with their peers on statewide tests.
“We’re very aware of test scores because everyone has said our kids can’t learn in Hawaiian,” says Pila Wilson, a professor of Hawaiian language and studies at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. He’s also a board member of ‘Aha Punana Leo, the nonprofit organization that created and runs the immersion schools along with the state education department and the University of Hawaii.
But the growing program is still struggling to be understood by state and federal officials, who are more accustomed to handling funding and regulations for foreign-language or bilingual programs.
“Our biggest problem has been trying to work our program into the state’s system. They just can’t move as fast as we’d like them to,” Wilson says.
The group has bought and maintained school sites--declaring them to be public schools--and even paid teacher salaries until the state was able to cover the cost. Wilson describes the group’s role in the public school system as “semi-civil disobedience with tacit approval from the state.”
In many ways, ‘Aha Punana Leo’s push for recognition is similar to the experiences that other groups have had in dealing with Hawaii’s single, statewide school system--the only such K-12 structure in any of the 50 states. The education department is described by many here as being overly bureaucratic and resistant to change. Teachers and parents often feel excluded.
“That shouldn’t be the case here,” Paul G. LeMahieu, the state’s newly appointed superintendent, says. “We are a unitary system. We could be different.”
The Hawaii board of education’s decision to hire LeMahieu--the first superintendent to come from outside the state school system since Hawaii became a state in 1959--is the department’s signal that it’s ready for change. LeMahieu, 45, who started work here Sept. 1, replaced Herman M. Aizawa, a 30-year veteran of the Hawaii schools. Aizawa resigned in June and is now the principal of one of the system’s community schools.
LeMahieu “has a fresh perspective,” says Karen Knudsen, the chairwoman of the state board. “That is what this system needs right now.”
Besides LeMahieu, new people are moving in to other key positions in the state’s education structure at what many say is a critical time for education in Hawaii. The University of Hawaii’s new dean of education and the Hawaii State Teachers Association’s new president are among those who are hopeful about the school system’s future.
The state is also in the midst of a gubernatorial race that could result in the election of the state’s first Republican governor. Linda Lingle, who is now serving her second term as the mayor of Maui, handily beat Frank Fasi, a former Honolulu mayor, in the Sept. 19 primary. The Republican has been leading Democratic Gov. Benjamin J. Cayetano in the polls.
The question remains whether new leaders can have a significant influence on the broad range of problems that have bedeviled the state education system: The list includes overcrowded and outdated classrooms, a consent decree governing special education services, teacher shortages, and a package of academic standards that few local schools have taken seriously.
But the most pressing issue facing Hawaii and its schools is one that is beyond the control of educators. For the past several years, while the rest of the country has enjoyed flush financial times, Hawaii’s economy has been stagnant. Financial troubles in Japan have kept tourists from that country home, cutting a huge chunk out of Hawaii’s tourism dollars. Likewise, once-profitable farming land has been sold off over time as major agricultural companies have moved overseas.
And a recent report from the U.S. General Accounting Office noted that among all the states, only Hawaii has not benefited from additional resources made available by the federal welfare-reform law--money that most state governments have been able to save or spend on other priorities. While welfare caseloads in most states are declining, Hawaii’s has increased.
So even though Hawaii’s student population is growing by at least 1,000 students each year, funding from the legislature has not increased. Over the next 10 years, Hawaii’s student population is projected to grow 13.2 percent, second only to California’s 15 percent.
Positions have been cut in the school system’s seven administrative districts, which function primarily as extensions of the central office to handle matters unique to a certain area of the state. That has left local principals and school staffs loaded with additional routine responsibilities, such as purchasing.
Paid internship and mentoring projects for students in school-to-work programs also have been hurt because of layoffs and downsizing at many businesses.
To some, however, the economy should not be an excuse.
“This is a real pass-the-buck system,” says Joan Lewis, an HSTA representative who teaches 7th grade social studies at Nankuli High and Intermediate School in Waianae.
The state’s elected school board tends to blame the legislature for not appropriating enough money, she says, while the legislature says its hands are tied because the board is responsible for setting policy.
Lewis’ school, on the Waianae coast of Oahu where tourists rarely tread, is among those that are the neediest in the state. There is a heavy concentration of Hawaiians, and poverty is evident. Old Quonset huts purchased from the military to be used as homes are sprinkled among small houses.
Teachers in this area, often recruited from other states, tend to be the least experienced. And turnover is high because most teachers would prefer to work closer to the metropolitan Honolulu area. Others return to the mainland because their experience isn’t the “working vacation” they expected it to be, Lewis says.
Facilities--not just those in the school system’s Leeward district, which Lewis represents in the teachers’ union, but throughout the state--are badly in need of repair and updating. Seventy-three of the district’s 253 schools are more than 50 years old.
The state is in the midst of a school building program and has even used capital-improvement projects to try to jump-start the economy. But maintenance at older schools has been deferred because of the budget crisis. The legislature this year approved $704 million in education spending, $50 million shy of the department’s request. For fiscal year 1999-2000, the department will ask for $796 million. There have been no major increases in funding for several years; in fact, during the current economic crisis, funding has dipped as low as $680 million.
In the past two years, 12 schools have been built or are now under construction. But the sight of some of those new buildings leaves teachers and parents questioning just how fair the system is.
Only six schools--five of them new--have air-conditioning, even though most qualify for it based on such criteria as temperature and outside noise levels.
At Ma’ili Elementary in Waianae, which is surrounded by a chicken farm, a pig farm, and a cattle ranch, community members were willing to buy air conditioners for the school, but electrical service was insufficient.
Cultural gaps between Hawaiian children--the largest ethnic group in the school system--and their teachers, who are predominantly Japanese-American or white, also are evident in communities like Waianae.
“It’s home culture vs. school culture,” says Lilette Subedi, a comprehensive-project manager at Alu Like, a nonprofit group in Honolulu serving native Hawaiians through vocational education and other training programs.
For example, in Hawaiian homes, it’s considered disrespectful to look an elder directly in the eye. In the classroom, such behavior might be interpreted as rude. Hawaiian students might also be less outgoing in school because working cooperatively is valued more highly than showing off, Subedi said.
Statewide, Hawaii students generally perform below the national norms in reading and mathematics on the Stanford Achievement Test, although there were improvements at the 6th grade level last year. This year’s results are due out this month.
On the most recent SAT, Hawaii’s public school students posted a verbal score of 459, compared with the national average of 502, out of a possible 800.
School officials attribute the low scores, in part, to the diversity of the student population. The largest segment, at 25 percent, is made up of Hawaiian or part-Hawaiian students. Other large categories include Filipinos at 19 percent, whites at 16 percent, and Japanese-Americans at 12 percent. The “other” category only a tiny percentage in most states makes up 11 percent of Hawaii’s students.
Intermarriage is widespread in the state; the term “multicultural” often applies not just to whole classrooms but individual families as well.
“Hawaii is today where a good part of the United States is going to be in the next 20 years,” observes Randy Hitz, the new dean of the college of education at the University of Hawaii in Manoa.
The task of those who try to evaluate the public schools is complicated by the fact that many of the state’s highest-achieving students leave the system; about 15 percent of the state’s students attend private schools, compared with 11 percent nationally.
“It makes it a little more difficult to say how the public schools are doing,” says Ormond Hammond, the director of planning and evaluation at Pacific Resources for Education and Learning, or prel, a federally funded research laboratory in Honolulu responsible for Hawaii and the Pacific islands.
In fact, ‘Aha Punana Leo leaders say one of their greatest challenges is to hang on to students from the Hawaiian-immersion programs once they reach high school because being fluent in the language is considered a plus by private schools.
Not surprisingly, it’s the centralized structure of Hawaii’s education system that is often blamed for any shortcomings, particularly low achievement. And a plan to break up the single statewide system into local school boards has become a top campaign issue for Mayor Lingle, the Republican candidate for governor.
“Decentralization is imperative if the school system in Hawaii is going to improve,” Lingle said recently.
Her plan is to divide the system into county school boards. Oahu, the county that includes Honolulu and is home to roughly 80 percent of the state’s residents, would have four local boards. The remaining three counties in the state--which in some cases include more than one island--would each have one board.
The result, Lingle argues, would be increased community and parent involvement and more consideration of teachers’ concerns and ideas.
But opponents of such a setup say that decentralization doesn’t make sense for a school system with 189,000 students. Hawaii falls at number nine in a comparison of the nation’s largest school districts, but among states, Hawaii ranks 40th in student population.
Hawaii also differs from other states in that all school funding--other than federal dollars--comes out of the state’s general fund, allowing per-pupil spending to stay fairly equal from school to school.
That is in sharp contrast, for example, to New Hampshire, where 90 percent of the money for education comes from local property taxes--a school financing system that was ruled unconstitutional by that state’s supreme court last year because of the disparities it creates between districts.
Carl Takamura, the executive director of the Hawaii Business Roundtable, defends the centralized system, saying, “If we didn’t do it this way, the neighbor islands would really hurt.”
Gov. Cayetano, who opposes decentralization, says, “We don’t want to become a state of haves and have-nots.”
Even Lingle’s plan would keep funding coming from the state, but some observers say having locally elected school boards without any taxing authority would never work.
Despite the frustrations people have with the education department, there are benefits to having one statewide district, says Tom Barlow, the director of the center for teaching and learning assistance at PREL.
Innovations that might remain isolated in most states can quickly reach the far corners of Hawaii, Barlow says. In fact, Hawaii’s schools are more technologically advanced than those in some other states, with every school already connected to the Internet, thanks to a push from the state legislature.
Takamura, of the Hawaii Business Roundtable, is one of many in the state who say decentralization should be taking place in other ways, by giving schools and parents more authority to make decisions.
The state’s school- and community-based management, or SCBM, structure has been in place since 1989, and almost 90 percent of the schools have implemented it to varying degrees. One of the most obvious examples of this shift has been an increase in the number of schools that operate year round. Seventy-two schools now follow modified schedules.
Schools also have been given more control over financial decisions and the flexibility to move money between programs, says Arthur Kaneshiro, the director of the education department’s school-improvement and community-leadership group.
In 1995, WestEd, a regional education laboratory in San Francisco, evaluated nine SCBM schools and found some promising results, such as improved collaboration between teachers and growing confidence in the schools among parents.
But Susan St. Aubin, the president of the Hawaii pta, said that from her vantage point, decentralized school management is not working well. Most schools, she says, are still “principal-run, controlled, and driven.”
Beyond SCBM, the state also has a 4-year-old charter school law, which allows up to 25 schools that are referred to in the state as “student centered schools.” It’s a conversion-only law, meaning that only existing public schools can become student-centered schools. But only two schools have taken advantage of the law, backing up charter school advocates’ conclusions that the state’s law is among the weakest in the nation. Even Kaneshiro says the legislation was “shortsighted and does not give the flexibility that was hoped for.”
Other schools have not taken the step “because they know we are in pain,” says Donna Estomago, the principal of Lanikai Elementary School in Kailua, a student-centered school on the eastern side of Oahu. “This has been the most painful professional experience of my whole life.”
She talks about testy discussions over funding and a lack of interest from state officials.
“I just want to make sure we’re getting what we’re supposed to get,” she says.
Wearing a Hawaiian shirt--appropriate business attire in the Aloha State--and no shoes, Superintendent LeMahieu appears to have gotten comfortable quickly with his new assignment.
A basket overflowing with leis, the traditional Hawaiian necklaces made of various flowers, shells, or nuts that are given as a sign of welcome, rests on his conference table and has been filled three times, he says.
Policymakers and education leaders in the state voice almost unanimous support for LeMahieu’s appointment and a sense of optimism about his ability to lead the school system. Respected for his work on standards and accountability, LeMahieu most recently served as the director of the Delaware Education Research and Development Center at the University of Delaware in Newark. He also worked on strategic planning and evaluation in the Pittsburgh public schools for 11 years.
While not born in Hawaii, he spent much of his childhood here, and has worked as an education consultant in the state. In fact, he says he’s in the perfect position of being familiar with the people and the culture of the state but free from any political connections that someone from within the department would have.
Enthusiasm over his arrival waned a bit, however, once negotiations over his moving expenses hit the local newspapers. Because the state had never hired a superintendent from outside Hawaii--much less from the East Coast--the school board had never had to cover relocation costs, which climb to nearly $30,000 when furniture and belongings have to be shipped across the Pacific.
Teachers, who repeatedly had been hearing about the education department’s money problems and were preoccupied with needs at their own schools, didn’t take the news well.
“They were saying, ‘We’ve got shortages, and we’ve got to pay you more?’” says Lewis, the teacher from Waianae.
The situation illustrates in many ways what sets Hawaii--as an island state--apart from the rest of the country. Simply because of the distance between the state’s eight major islands, costs multiply quickly.
For example, St. Aubin, the state PTA president, can’t attend an evening parent meeting at a school on another island without getting a hotel room because the latest flights back to Oahu leave before the meetings end.
Sensing that parents, teachers, and others feel distant from the school system, LeMahieu’s first move as state chief was to call for a systemwide “needs assessment” that will involve a broad range of people. The end product, due in January, will be a strategic plan and a “mountain of provocative stuff for the board to dive into,” he says.
While not an original approach, it’s one that LeMahieu believes will draw people closer to the department and make them feel part of the process.
LaMahieu has also taken a stab at breaking a tradition that most observers view as just another example of cronyism in state government. Instead of replacing the top 21 administrators in the system with “his” people, as past appointees have done, he has asked all of them to remain on an interim basis.
The positions will then be posted, and committees made up of principals, parents, and other key people will have a chance to influence his hiring decisions, he says.
Special education problems also await the superintendent. The education department and the state health department are operating under a consent decree stemming from a 1994 class action against the governor over mental-health services.
In the case, Felix v. Cayetano, the U.S. District Court in Hawaii found that the state had underidentified children with mental-health needs and had very limited means of serving them. The state now has less than two years to implement what is known as the Felix Plan, which includes such requirements as “community children’s councils"-- groups made up of parents and service providers that give support to families and feedback about services--and “care coordinators,” who act as case managers for children with more complex needs.
A recent report from the court monitor said that while progress has been made, “there are areas within the department of education where the commitment to full implementation of all the agreed-on requirements and orders of the court for each student continues to be perceived as resistance by many of the stakeholders.”
At the time the case was filed, about 12,000 children were receiving special education services. Now, close to 21,000 students receive those services, and about 16,000 of those are included in regular classrooms for at least part of the school day. Eighty-three children have been placed in programs out of state, a far more expensive solution for Hawaii than it would be for the state’s mainland counterparts.
The state is still falling far short of recruiting the number of special education teachers it needs to meet the demand. About 400 new teachers certified in special education are needed next school year. Last year, the University of Hawaii graduated only 38.
As a result, regular classroom teachers are feeling overloaded by the inclusion of special education students.
“My nights were consumed with doing [individual education plans] and documentation. Your class suffers,” says Susan Chinen, a former special education teacher at Nanakuli High and Intermediate School who is now a guidance counselor.
One of the priorities of the HSTA, the state affiliate of the National Education Association, has been hiring clerical workers to relieve special education teachers of routine paperwork. But no money has been allocated to meet the request.
While such problems are not unique to Hawaii, the state probably was less prepared than others to handle it, LeMahieu says.
“The biggest problem is that the system hasn’t gotten serious about this until now,” the new superintendent says.
Other officials have blamed the legislature for not appropriating enough money to address the problem, while state lawmakers, as one put it, “don’t want to just pour money into a deep black hole.”
LeMahieu’s proposal is to fully implement the Felix Plan in one complex--meaning a high school and its feeder schools--and to ask the court to lift the consent decree for that complex. Those schools could then be used as an example to others in the district.
“People have no sense of what success looks like,” he says. “There’s a huge amount of confusion over what is required of us.”
Eric A. Seitz, a lead lawyer for the plaintiffs in the case, said that while he’s willing to give LeMahieu a chance, he thinks the new school chief’s proposal may be “too little, too late.”
“We don’t have the luxury of pulling back at this point,” Seitz says, adding that even before the 2000 deadline, the court may decide that the department is not up to the task and turn control of the program over to a receiver--an entity that would run the state’s program for children with mental-health needs.
The consent decree has also grabbed the attention of gubernatorial hopeful Lingle, who says that, if elected, she would conduct a management and financial audit of all special education programs and services.
Lingle’s other campaign promises, such as class-size reduction, combined with some teachers’ feelings about Cayetano, were enough to keep the teachers’ union from endorsing the Democratic incumbent at the same time it announced its choices in every other race. Though late last month, the union’s board of directors announced that it will back Cayetano.
Dissatisfaction with the governor among teachers can be traced to last year, when they were within hours of going on strike over pay and other issues.
“There are a lot of emotions involved,” says Karen Ginoza, the HSTA’s new president. “The governor became the target of our anger.”
Still, a lot of educators give Cayetano credit for sparing the education budget from some of the deep cuts that hit other departments.
Teachers walked away from their contract negotiations with a 17 percent raise--which includes seven days added to the school calendar--while raises for other state employees were not honored.
Cayetano’s second-term priorities would be to add more computers to the schools and to build more accountability into the system, an area in which LeMahieu specializes.
Whoever wins the Nov. 3 election will, like LeMahieu, be stepping in at a time when several issues affecting the schools are converging at once. But it’s the consent decree that one state official believes will be the true test for the Hawaii system.
“This court order, despite the threatening nature of it, is probably exactly what is needed at this point in time to jar us from our complacency,” says Linda Colburn, who was hired as a manager in the governor’s office to get the health department and the education department to work more closely together. “This remedy can only strengthen the whole system.”
