Officials with the Hawaii Board of Education are weighing a question that confronts government decisionmakers everywhere: How do you balance control of the public purse with the need to recruit the administrators you need?

Wherever the BOE draws that line, they should keep accountability to high performance standards in mind.

Additionally, Hawaii’s pay levels must reflect what is needed to retain and recruit talent from a nationwide pool; the goal should not be merely to stay ahead of employees who are paid according to a different formula.

The issue is made stickier here because of the way the public schools are administered. Above the school level, the state Department of Education is run by non-unionized managers, with their salaries tiered according to rank.

The problem in Hawaii is that on the campuses, school principals are members of the Hawaii Government Employees Association. In addition to the general awkwardness that can arise from unionized principals managing members of another union, the contract has produced pay levels that are complicating matters in particular now.

Specifically, the school board is concerned that top-level administrators, whose pay has been frozen for seven years, are now being outpaced in compensation by some school principals.

Before 2011, salaries of the deputy superintendent, six assistant superintendents and 15 complex-area superintendents were capped at 80 percent of what the state superintendent is paid.

And that is limited by state law to $150,000 annually, which is what Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi has been earning since she took the top job in 2010.

State lawmakers lifted that cap two years ago, but budgetary considerations had constrained top pay levels until recently.

Now that the fiscal belt-tightening has eased somewhat, the BOE is taking another look.

Since 2006, principals have received across-the-board increases amounting to 11.5 percent in all, compounded by step increases equal to a 3.6 percent boost. The furloughs and recession-driven pay cuts reversed some of that, but the reductions will be restored in the coming fiscal year, which starts in July.

The effect of those contract provisions has been substantial, especially with more senior principals. Two principals now earn more than Matayoshi, let alone any of her lieutenants who outrank principals in every way other than pay.

The only way to create a more rational command structure for the DOE would be to take principals out of the union and reorder pay levels according to rank.

Given the power and political influence of the unions and the fact that it would require constitutional amendments, it’s likelier that a blizzard will hit Honolulu this summer than a change in union representation will happen. So the BOE is going to have to make the best decision it can under the circumstances.

Board Chairman Don Horner is signalling that changes in compensation will be predicated on administrators achieving objectives in the strategic plan. This is a reasonable approach, given that teachers and principals will be expected to do the same thing, under the terms of their contracts. But the bar must be set high. Administrators need to be accountable to significant improvement benchmarks.

In a system that currently pays some principals more than its top administrators, the compensation scheme is not going to be made rational overnight.

The BOE knows what it would take to make that happen — having principals become full-fledged managers.

Even if the school board embraced that goal as it should, it remains a long-term project.