Guard academic rigor in schools

The problem with the pendulum is not the fact that it swings — as it is doing now at the state Department of Education. The danger is that it can take too long to settle where it belongs, somewhere in the middle.

Kathryn Matayoshi, appointed as schools superintendent in 2010, will see her tenure come to an end when her current contract runs out June 30. The state Board of Education, which decided against a renewal, announced last week it is beginning a search to replace her.

Clearly it falls to the BOE to help the department through a tough transition and find leadership capable of accommodating more educational creativity and control at the school level without entirely losing the increase in academic rigor. A lot of that is still worth keeping.

Matayoshi took over at a time when there was a need for someone unafraid of administering the DOE with a firm hand. She was not an educator but came to the job from the business world, heading the Hawaii Business Roundtable. Administrative acumen proved useful in the face of stiff federal guidance, during the efforts to meet strict standards-driven mandates of No Child Left Behind and the competitive Race to the Top school transformation campaign.

However, the call for a top-down administrative style has been giving way, in the waning days of the Obama administration, to a less fettered approach. The aim to remove some of the teachers’ constraints is embodied in the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The federal law was enacted in December 2015 as a reauthorization of No Child — basically a reimagining of it.

The writing was on the wall signifying that the superintendent was on the outs as soon as Gov. David Ige convened a task force to develop Hawaii’s ESSA plan. Matayoshi was not named to the panel, which is due to present its proposal to the BOE this month.

Ige said forcefully through his campaign and into his administration that he wanted more control shifted from the central DOE bureaucracy to the school level, empowering principals and teachers. The challenge will be achieving the promised flexibility within reasonable boundaries.

According to the state’s ESSA fact sheet, “school accountability is expanded beyond test proficiency to include multiple measures.” For example, school performance will be evaluated at least partly on the basis of how much academic “growth” it achieves, rather than simply comparing test scores to a rigid yardstick. Schools also can be judged by improvement in its graduation rates or various other measures of school success.

But under the new law, the DOE still must adopt “challenging standards in reading math and science, aligned to credit-bearing college entrance requirements and technical standards.”

In addition, the Hawaii Common Core curriculum for English language arts and math, as well as BOE-approved science standards, will be implemented starting in 2018.

So while teachers should feel less constrained by pressure to “teach to the test” as has been the practice for a decade, they still must be held accountable. Individual principals can and should play a greater role in oversight of teacher performance and school achievement.

But Hawaii still has a single, unified school district. The DOE comprises 255 conventional public schools, as well as 33 charter schools that must pass muster, too.

A thousand flowers should be allowed to bloom, with creativity encouraged at the classroom level. In an educational landscape as varied as Hawaii’s, though, schools still will need guidance and oversight from the central office, especially in the early years of transition.

The greatest challenge now is finding leadership to support schools in finding their balance. In the unsettled realm of the DOE, equilibrium is what they will need.