Call a special session to improve education in Hawaii

Recently, a person I met told me his greatest fear.

He is 60 years old, attended public school and was later a graduate of one of Hawaii’s most exclusive private schools, then went to a mainland university as well as the University of Hawaii.

His father was a well-known doctor; his granddaughter, who lives with him and his wife, has just had a baby. She barely managed to graduate from a public high school. Her boyfriend, the father of her child, is a high school dropout. He looks at his own story as a metaphor for Hawaii as a whole.

The level of educational accomplishments in Hawaii among local families is cascading downward, and the answer among many in state government and the public school system seems to be that it can’t be helped — what years ago was paraphrased in Japanese local culture by the expression "Shikata ga nai."

For years, the Democratic Party of Hawaii and Hawaii teachers were at the forefront of the battle to overcome this fatalistic view of the future. But in recent years, because of demographic and other changes in Hawaii, they have had limited success. It is not their fault. Young people are no longer a priority.

The U.S. Army Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) is the most widely given high school multiple-choice aptitude test in the world. The three-hour test includes questions on history, general science, writing, word knowledge and practices skills and is given to self-selected young people 17-20 years old. A recent study by the Educational Trust of 350,000 test takers, who had taken the test between 2004 and 2009, indicated that Hawaii students had the highest ineligibility rate on the basic military recruit tests among 50 states (http://www.edtrust.org/sites/edtrust.org/files/publications/files/ASVAB_4.pdf).

This means that significant numbers of students have graduated from Hawaii public schools unable to read, write or do mathematics. The low performance levels at the public schools and the high drop-out rate of the University of Hawaii are interrelated.

Experts cite many reasons: students increasingly coming from unstable single-parent households; the high divorce rate; the lack of role models; diabetes; increasing numbers of immigrants from Pacific Islands; the difficulty of providing for special needs students; etc.

The answer to this situation, we are told, is to sell some public school property to private developers, lower educational accountability standards for young people, eliminate the elected school board, raise salaries for senior Department of Education administrators and increase testing.

To makes things worse, many local young people going to school on the mainland can’t take classes at the University of Hawaii during the summer because the reputation of the university is such that the credits don’t carry. Administrators shrug; too bad for them. "Shikata ga nai."

Perhaps it’s time to stop worrying about the problems and call a special session of the Legislature to find solutions to the many issues children, young people and their families face in Hawaii.

We need to bring in outside experts with new ideas to the Department of Education. That’s what the "old" Democrats of the 1950s and ’60s would have done. They would have never said "Shikata ga Nai" about the future.

We shouldn’t either. When you are last in the country, you have to change.