The public sentiment and the political climate may be right at last for lawmakers to give the state superintendent one tool she needs to help failing schools right themselves quickly enough to benefit their students.

That tool is a process called "reconstitution," and efforts to pass it in recent years have run aground on the shoals of union opposition. It cleared its first hurdle this week when House Bill 339 won the unanimous approval of the Education Committee.

It’s good to see the state Department of Education chief, Kathryn Matayoshi, taking up the cause from her predecessor, Patricia Hamamoto. Both have argued forcefully that the chief administrator of schools needs the power to use her staff in a way that best serves the students, particularly in schools that have struggled on their own to correct persistent shortcomings.

Reconstitution would allow the schools superintendent to redirect staff and change the overall mission at schools where progress has stalled. It would be considered only after a school has been under federal No Child Left Behind sanctions ("in restructuring") for four years without significant success.

Union leaders consider reconstitution an end run on collective bargaining and are strongly opposed. Wil Okabe, president of the Hawaii State Teachers Association, testified at the Wednesday hearing that the proposed law sends "a counterproductive, negative message" to teachers already facing hardships in prodding their students toward success in No Child testing.

"Now with this bill, the DOE proposes yet another huge morale buster for teachers, threatening them with removal and transfer to another institution, not because of anything they have personal control over, but because the school as a whole is supposedly not performing at an acceptable level," he said.

But the deciding factor in assembling a school faculty should be the needs of the students. If a school is consistently failing, it likely is not because of an individual teacher but because the combination of teachers, administrators and staff doesn’t meet that particular school’s needs. The superintendent deserves the authority to correct that mismatch.

Further, although unions could not block the reconstitution itself, the process would involve labor negotiations over the reassignment of staff for schools to be dismantled and rebuilt.

Matayoshi told the committee that passage of the bill would underscore the Legislature’s commitment "for transformative educational reform outlined in the Hawaii Race to the Top application."

Winning the Race to the Top grant was based in part on convincing federal educational officials that this commitment exists.

Critics of the current No Child law cite its one-size-fits-all orientation and its fairly punitive approach to correcting failing schools. They are right about that, and Congress should make significant adjustments as it reauthorizes the federal statute.

But until that happens, Hawaii is accountable to a 2014 deadline to meet specified educational goals. It’s unreasonable to hold Matayoshi, or any other educational administrator, to that mandate without giving her the means to fix what’s wrong with the state’s most troubled schools.