More than two years have passed since Hawaii’s Board of Education appointed by Gov. Neil Abercrombie replaced a school board elected by voters — with today marking term expirations for the first two of Abercrombie’s nine appointees, Kim Gennaula and Charlene Cuaresma.
The switch from elected to appointed school board was hotly debated in the fall of 2010, with voters ultimately passing a state constitutional amendment allowing the change. Back then, advocates called an appointed board a crucial key to improving Hawaii’s troubled public school system. The question today: Has it made any difference?
"I think it needs to have a few more years maybe to see if it can sort itself out," said Joan Husted, former executive director of the Hawaii State Teachers Association, who still would prefer an elected board.
But Schools Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi, who was named to her job by the new board in September 2010 after serving as interim superintendent for most of that year, gives it high marks.
"They’ve tried to do outreach in different ways," Matayoshi said, and it "is working pretty well."
From her viewpoint as principal of private Saint Louis School, Patricia Hamamoto — who preceded Matayoshi as superintendent — said the Department of Education "has made what I consider to be positive progress. I think a lot of the decisions being made are on target to move our students to a higher level of achievement."
Hamamoto had publicly supported the change from elected to appointed school board members. The teachers union took the lead in opposing an appointed board.
Voters approved the appointed board in the November 2010 election, as 57 percent gave up their right to choose members of the school board, with 43 percent voting against it or left the ballot blank.
Garrett Toguchi, then chairman of the elected BOE, had warned that gubernatorial appointments "would be made without true public involvement, based on politics and party lines instead of the needs of our students."
After making inconsistent statements about an appointed board prior to the 2010 election, Abercrombie said he voted for the amendment "to give myself the opportunity, if I become governor, to appoint the school board."
The nine-member BOE hires Hawaii’s schools superintendent and sets policy for the nation’s ninth-largest school district, which has a $1.77 billion annual budget and some 22,000 full-time employees — including 13,000 teachers, serving about 180,000 students from kindergarten to grade 12.
In a major difference from the elected-board era, the goals of Hawaii’s present school board and the Department of Education now benefit from aligned strategic plans, Matayoshi said.
"The previous board had different committees and much more diverse interests and projects that they were interested in and so there was not much consensus and focus," she said. "The strategic plans allow the board to really focus on that. I think that’s helped us."
For example, the board and department agreed on a waiver from provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind in conformity with the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The Obama administration approved Hawaii’s request in May.
"So now when it was approved, we have our federal accountability measures that are the same as our strategic plan measures, so now they’re aligned," Matayoshi said. "It’s not just a strategic plan; it’s also a federal accountability that we have to report on to the feds."
Back in 2010, the push for an appointed school board came amid much turmoil for the public schools system. Teacher furloughs in 2009 had left Hawaii students with the nation’s shortest school year, so when an appointed school board was proposed — the third time in 40 years that the constitutional question appeared on Hawaii’s ballot — it finally succeeded. A prevailing talking point, too, was that accountability for students’ education and the schools system would rest squarely on the governor — a significant consideration with the public schools embarking on sweeping reform efforts.
In addition to the high fiscal stakes over teachers’ contract and federal grants such as Race to the Top, major initiatives were, and continue to be, on the line. Tens of millions of dollars are being spent to improve low-performing campuses, track and support teacher effectiveness, and boost student achievement.
The BOE conducts public meetings on the first and third Tuesdays of every month, plus special meetings as required; it receives requests and petitions from the public as well as reports from the schools superintendent, the state librarian, board committees, commissions and student representatives.
Much of Husted’s concern is that the present school board conducts its business sessions during the workdays, she said, while the elected board held those sessions in the evenings when it would "be able to hear from the community, not necessarily just in community meetings but during their business sessions as well."
Matayoshi said evening business meetings by the elected board had relatively little attendance, and board chairman Don Horner is planning to expand methods, such as online social sites, for members of the community to be heard.
"When I was superintendent, if parents couldn’t get there to do a formal in-person presentation," Hamamoto said, "they still got their issues, their concerns, their positions across to us by other means."
One of the concerns about the elected school board was that the low voter turnouts allowed special-interest groups — specifically the teachers union — to dominate the board.
"In American politics, that allows special interest groups to dominate any election," Husted said. "If we take the position that you have to have a certain percentage of voter turnout to have a viable election, I’m afraid there are hundreds and hundreds and maybe thousands of elected officials who would not be elected."
If the teachers union was able to place their selections on the elected school board, they didn’t take advantage, former superintendent Hamamoto said.
"I didn’t see the unions favoring any one (candidate)," Hamamoto said. "They endorsed, but overall those that they endorsed did not in many incidents favor the union over the department. There was a lot of aloha, but not necessarily ‘we’re going to go union because.’"
Nor does the appointed board necessarily act on particular school issues on the governor’s behalf, acknowledged Husted.
"It doesn’t seem to have done that," she said. "If the board is a rubber stamp of the governor, the governor needs to have a nice long talk with them, I think." The same is his lack of control over the superintendent chosen by the appointed board.
"My impression is that the appointed school board and the superintendent are still quite at arm’s length from the governor," Husted said.
How politics might influence educational policy-making could become more apparent soon. Tapped to replace Gennaula and Cuaresma are Amy Asselbaye, who was a longtime aide to Abercrombie both in Congress and at the state Capitol, and Patricia Halagao, an associate professor in curriculum studies at UH-Manoa’s College of Education. They need to be confirmed by the state Senate next year.
The past two years have shown that an appointed school board "works to the department’s favor in a relationship that everyone is in sync to what the governor and what the state of Hawaii want for their children, their keiki," Hamamoto said. "I do. I see that happening."
