Education is the best way to improve social mobility.

Unfortunately, Hawaii’s underfunded public schools too often reinforce the existing social class and hence turn our class system into a caste system.

The public school system in Hawaii was created in a segregated manner. Missionary children and later the children of plantation owners were sent to private schools, while the children of the plantation workers went to public schools.

During the plantation era of Hawaii, public schools were purposely kept substandard. As one plantation owner supposedly said about public school children, "If you educate them beyond the sixth grade, they will become a menace."

The Big Five wanted poorly educated workers to keep wages low and plantation profits high. Since land was owned by the wealthy few, Hawaii, unlike its mainland counterparts, doesn’t fund education through property taxes. Since property taxes are not used, there is no dedicated source of income for schools, and instead public school funding comes from the general fund and has been perpetually underfunded. Today, Hawaii leads the nation in the percent of students attending private school. The cost of educating a student at Punahou School is about $26,000 per year, compared to $8,000 per year for a regular education student at a public school.

Whenever we talk about increasing funding for Hawaii’s schools, there are those who cry that the DOE already gets too much and wastes what it gets. But if one looks at the funding for each public school student, one sees the disparity. A better question might be: Why is $8,000 for a public school student wasteful, but not $26,000 for a private school student?

Recently Punahou announced that it is raising tuition to "retain and support the best teachers we can." Hawaii public school teachers, on the other hand, are the worst paid teachers in the nation when cost of living is considered. This leads to the third highest teacher turnover rate in the nation and a persistent inability to fill classrooms with highly qualified professionals.

Other districts in the U.S. with similar cost of living (New York, D.C., Chicago) pay their teachers on average $30,000 more per year, while the best education systems in the world (Japan, South Korea) pay their teachers like engineers.

It is not just low teacher pay, though, that impedes teacher recruitment and retention. Our school buildings are over 65 years old on average, as seen when Farrington High School’s auditorium collapsed in 2012. Teachers teach in classrooms that reach 100 degrees. Class sizes are increasing. Yet, there is little dedication to fixing these problems because Hawaii, through its chronic lacking of funding and high rate of private school attendance, have codified inequality.

Instead of properly funding our public schools to address the inequality between private and public school, politicians and higher-ups in the Department of Education keep seeking gimmicks — i.e., more tests, teacher evaluations — to give the appearance of change without dealing with the underlying roots of inequality or poverty. After all, many of those higher-ups opt to send their own children to private school instead of investing in public schools like the rest of lower- and moderate-income families.

In Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregating schools based on race was unconstitutional. Now, in Hawaii, we segregate our children based on their parents’ income.

If our society truly values equality, then we must give all children, regardless of their socio-economic class, an equal opportunity for a better future, which begins by fully funding our public school system.

Corey Rosenlee is a social studies teacher at Campbell High School. He is running for president of the Hawaii State Teachers Association; the other candidate, Kapolei High teacher Joan Lewis, authored a piece here last week (http://bit.ly/1CW3re9).