Karen Street

Karen Street was getting a touch of cold feet when she was first named chairwoman of the new Hawaii Public Charter School Commission, the body standing at the helm of reforms to the state’s 32 charter schools.

That feeling started dissipating when what she described as an optimistic tone took hold on the state Board of Education.

“I can truly say I am really excited about this,” said Street, 59.

She will keep her paid post as vice president of organizational development at First Insurance Co. of Hawaii while she pursues this latest passion. A human-resources orientation, she acknowledged, is not a bad asset to have when the mission is to restructure governance of the school organization.

The commission basically replaces the Charter Schools Review Panel in this task, one of the results of Act 130, passed last legislative session. The BOE has hired the National Association of Charter Schools Authorizers (NACSA) to guide the commission through the overhaul over the next year.

When she’s not juggling her two vocations, one of her favorite places to be is in the stands cheering on the teams of her alma mater, the University of Hawaii.

But those moments are fleeting. The mother of two grown children never had a personal stake in charter schools but served on the Ho‘okako‘o Corp. board, an organization helping standard public schools convert to charters. The reason is simple: Street, a McKinley High School alumna, believes public school parents deserve more choices.

And despite revelations of lapses in academic and fiscal standards at some charters, there’s no lack of will to do better, she said.

“I think people want to do the right thing,” Street added. “It’s not people; it’s the processes and the structures that we failed to give them. We can fix that, then we will have a stronger charter school system.”

QUESTION: Do you think the reorganization will help solve problems encountered in some charter schools?

ANSWER: I think the new law provides the opportunity for a new beginning and more dialogue within the Charter School Commission community and also certainly outside of that — with the DOE, with other stakeholders.

Change is difficult, right? So obviously, everyone is slightly nervous. But I think we’re all going into it with, I think the word I’ve heard most used is “hope.” There’s a lot of hope with this new law, the clarity, the support. People said we’ve got an opportunity to bring charter schools up: They’re doing well, and how do we get them better as an alternative choice — a public-school choice? And oftentimes I think that gets missed.

Q: People are still unclear that charters are public? How long has the original law been on the books?

A: I think 1999 was the first enactment. But actually processes and things came much later. So there is that gap: Initial schools that got started, and then more schools … it wasn’t until probably the year the (Charter Schools Review) Panel got started where there was oversight. It was a gap.

Q: So what was the result of that gap?

A: I think unclear expectations. I’m an HR (human resources) person and I’m always saying, the starting point is clear expectations. Because people, I don’t care whether it’s employees at work or the schools, I don’t think they get up in the morning and say, “How do I screw up?”

Everyone wants to do a good job, and … the new law sets those expectations through a performance contract. And it’s academic as well as operational accountability metrics. So I think that clarity is kind of a real good beginning. Because when it’s clearer, people want to do a good job.

Q: What is your history with education? How did you get into this?

A: People are going to ask me: I’m a public school graduate … so I grew up in the public schools. … Actually, my family’s got lots of educators, and I always thought I would be a teacher. But when I went to University of Hawaii, there were way too many teachers in the ’70s, and I thought, “I’m going to graduate and have no job.”

So I said, “Fine, I’m going to take my love of education and learning, and take it into the business environment.” So my background is in human resources. …

I’m not trying to be flowery, but I think the BOE really did a good job in terms of thinking about diversity of skills and talents when they selected the commission. There’s a good balance of the business people and a good balance of the educators. … The commonality is I think we all believe in education, we all believe in charter school as a viable option.

I think there’s a lot of passion, and with passion comes strong personalities. I expect that we’re not going to always agree on everything. But I think that common goal of helping the charter schools be a viable option is what’s going to help us make the right decisions. … I don’t think any of us comes to the table with an agenda. There’s not a hidden agenda, except: What do we do for the benefit of our students and children, and the future? …

Q: What makes charter schools worthy of this investment of your time?

A: I think that charter schools provide an option to regular DOE schools. It offers a little more flexibility, perhaps, and the regular public schools may not be the correct environment for all students.

I think it provides parents an option to look for choice, in different kinds of settings, things that may align more with the way in which their child might learn, or value sets. …

Q: Can you give an example of a choice that might appeal to some parents? The Hawaiian-focused charters?

A: Absolutely. A lot of the charter schools, Hawaiian immersions, trying to teach it more from their beliefs, how you learn, adult role models involved. I think that’s one.

And online training, right? A lot of the schools have done really well with that. In the past maybe a lot of people homeschooled their kids, but without some structure. And now they can kind of have some of that value.

And smaller schools, extended hours. Some of the schools have gone to extended hours, which currently is not necessarily available and which allows more interfaces with the kids and time to learn. …

The charter school equation has always been about: Flexibility plus accountability equals the choice. … It gives them more flexibility in terms of curriculum, how they want to teach it and in what environment.

Q: How essentially did Act 130 increase accountability?

A: I think the biggest thing about Act 130 is it really provides for a charter school contract. And in that contract there’s a performance framework … It’s from an academic standpoint, and financial sustainability and accountability. It’s about achievement as well as methodology. There are multiple kinds of metrics in there that talk about the whole child, and the whole school, but I think those will all get spelled out clearer. …

And now under the new law, existing (Charter Schools Administrative Office) staff become staff for the commission, with all their talent, their experiences in education. So that will provide more resources to help with our oversight. …

Q: To free up time for CSAO staff to help the commission, some of their duties have been peeled off and given to the schools, right?

A: I think that’s not yet clear, and that’s what the transition coordinator will do … to look at the structure: What’s happening at CSAO? What’s the (Charter Schools) Network doing, what’s the commission doing, what are the schools doing? Certainly our intent is not to add additional burden on the schools. We want them educating! … Maybe there’s more things we can do to help lighten that burden so they can spend more time educating.

Q: What can you tell me about NACSA? Are they the go-to people in charter schools nationally?

A: Yes … The benefit for having a national not-for-profit organization helping Hawaii through the transition is they provide us the expertise because they’ve worked in many states, which will then save us time and money not having to reinvent the wheel. … They have worked in over 20 states, doing these performance contracts. …

The other thing that’s exciting is they’ve committed to having onsite, in Hawaii, two individuals on the ground, listening to the community, working with the community. So it’s marrying that national expertise with local sensitivity. … We’re not looking for a national solution; we’re looking for a local solution.

Q: What’s your own next task in all of this?

A: We have students enrolled in schools, there’s an expectation that school will start and things will move on. So we need to keep this current bus moving while we’re also creating a new bus.

During this interim period our first thing is to see what are the open issues from the review panel; that has to be addressed, because we have an obligation to the schools as well as the new applications (for new charters) that are in the queue.

Q: Can you give an example of the sort of innovations charter schools are providing?

A: They do project-based learning. Some of the schools have become incubators for learning curriculum and have developed relationships with the University of Hawaii College of Education. …

Certainly a lot in the Hawaiian values (charters). … It’s not about only the academic, it’s also about the heart. …   Maybe sometimes we’ve sucked a lot of that out, because we’re so focused on standards teaching.

We’ve had some of those students show up at the panel meeting. They’ve come and chanted in, I’m not Hawaiian, but what appears to me to be perfect Hawaiian intonation and pronunciation. They’ve chanted and danced, and I have to tell you … chicken-skin experiences.