Treat principals like management

Creating a more rational pay schedule for the mid-level administrators overseeing public schools won’t be an easy fix until the underlying system that caused the problem is overhauled as well.

An analysis released last week by the state Department of Education revealed that, on average, principals were earning about $10,000 more than the superintendents supervising school complex areas and $20,000 more than the state-level assistant superintendents, both positions that outrank any principal.

Some might support this, arguing that principals wield more influence than higher administrators over the success or failure of students — supposedly the DOE’s bottom-line concern. But a principal’s reassignment to the superintendent echelon is supposed to be a promotion. And if the aim is to improve the running of the department by hiring the best, the offer can’t be very enticing if the "promotion" comes with a pay cut.

How could this have happened in the first place?

One reason: Principals and vice principals function as managers of schools but are members of a union, the Hawaii Government Employees Association. Periodically someone points out the irrationality of this arrangement. Most recently a plea for change appears in Senate Bill 2458, a measure that was introduced by a group of five senators — J. Kalani English, Brickwood Galuteria, Gilbert Kahele, Michelle Kidani and Clarence Nishihara — but wasn’t given a hearing.

In the preamble of SB 2458, principals and vice principals are found to "exercise independent judgment in the interest of their employer, the Board of Education, to hire, transfer, suspend, promote, discharge, assign, reward and discipline other employees. Further, principals and vice principals handle grievances of other employees. Because the exercise of this authority is not of a merely routine or clerical nature, principals and vice principals are not appropriate members of a collective bargaining unit."

That makes sense. As the legislation asserts, it would be more appropriate for the posts to be filled by appointment of the superintendent, given that the superintendent is expected to "exert direct control over the managers of schools."

Otherwise, principals’ pay is intrinsically tied to unit-bargained step raises, so it’s difficult to see how the DOE and the overseeing Board of Education will ever reconcile principal-level salaries in relation to superintendent-level pay. Even if compensation for the appointed assistant and complex superintendents is raised, collective bargaining will provide the path for principal pay to keep inching upward until it surpasses the boss’ salary once again. Raising the bar again and again — especially when or if the school system does not get better — is no solution.

State law caps the top schools superintendent job at $150,000 annually; another law lets the BOE set salaries for those directly under the superintendent, without exceeding the top pay.

The BOE should devise a new pay scale for the underling superintendents, one that resolves the "internal pay equity" problem and one in which there are pay caps for all appointees. In addition, the board really should consider winnowing the number of these administrators, which would go some distance toward correcting the DOE’s top-heaviness. Lines of accountability can actually improve when there are fewer dots to connect.

But that move should be done in tandem with a push to correct the collective-bargaining mismatch. Principals and vice principals are front-line managers, and their union membership compromises their effectiveness in that role.