Settle principals’ evaluations now

For principals to be trusted as educational leaders, they need the faith of their school communities. Hawaii’s unionized public-school principals are sorely testing that faith with their resistance to performance contracts that were mandated by the Legislature in 2004 but which have yet to be implemented by the state Department of Education nine years later.

Now comes word that the DOE and Unit 06 of the Hawaii Government Employees Union, which represents about 700 educational officers, are wrangling yet again over the terms of the performance contracts, which are intended to improve Hawaii’s public schools by raising the standards of the educators who run them.

Neither side will say much with negotiations underway, but the crux of the dispute seems to center on tying the results of the principals’ evaluations to pay raises and potential job reassignments, or even dismissal.

The HGEA and DOE had agreed in principle to enforce the new evaluations this school year — with half of a principal’s rating based on the achievement of students at his or her school and the other half on leadership ratings — but the memorandum of agreement foundered over determining the consequences for educational officers deemed unsatisfactory and the rewards for those rated highly.

The proposed evaluation system is part of the principals’ overall union contract, and time is ticking away to resolve the issue. Principals have been working without a contract since their last pact expired on June 30; the dispute is headed to an arbitration hearing on Oct. 21 if the two sides can’t iron out their differences by then.

Representatives of the union and the Education Department express good faith and the hope that an agreement can be reached quickly. We hope those optimistic predictions are more than idle words.

In the nine years since the Legislature passed Act 51, with the promise that it would reinvent public education in Hawaii, students have been subjected to higher standards and high-stakes testing; public-school teachers have agreed to a four-year contract that links their own pay to how well students do in school; and parents and the general public have heard over and over again from the HGEA that the principals are willing to accept more accountability, too — they just need more time to work out the details.

That Hawaii’s public-school principals even belong to a union is a point of contention for us; a true educational reinvention would have been to entice the principals and vice principals to leave organized labor’s ranks and become a true cadre of professional managers.

Absent that, the best we can hope for is that the principals and the DOE will finally enact the type of evaluation and accountability system that public-school teachers have already accepted.

And there’s the rub: Teachers are understandably peeved that their bosses continue to evade the high-stakes performance evaluations that they have embraced. Starting July 1, 2015, teachers’ pay raises, tenure and potential termination will depend in part on annual performance evaluations that take student learning and growth into account.

A contract system that puts teachers’ futures on the line but preserves the status quo for principals is simply unsustainable. The HGEA and the DOE must settle this dispute, and quickly. Faith in the public-school principals is at stake.