Coming off a tumultuous period that saw a group of retired principals publicly, albeit unsuccessfully, seek her ouster, Hawaii schools Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi looks forward to the 2014-15 school year as one that will prove the worth of enormously hard work carried out in public schools over the past few years.
The outcry over whether Matayoshi’s contract should be extended — it was, for three more years — was fueled by an anonymous survey of sitting principals who said that they and many teachers were overwhelmed by unrealistic workloads, demoralized by stifling, top-down directives from the state office, and, most importantly, lacked confidence that a new system linking teachers’ pay to student performance was fair, feasible and would actually increase how much Hawaii schoolchildren learn.
Matayoshi and her leadership team, backed by the Board of Education, remain passionately committed to statewide educational reforms they insist are paying off for students, illustrated, for example, by Hawaii students’ rising scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the Nation’s Report Card, and by the uptick in high-school students taking and passing rigorous Advanced Placement college-prep courses.
Still, she emphasized that the Educator Effectiveness System, Hawaii’s new teacher evaluation system, was already being improved for the upcoming school year and that the department was open to further refinements, based on feedback from the field. Matayoshi acknowledged that administrative leadership must strive continuously to hear and incorporate suggestions from the educators who interact daily with students and parents at diverse public schools — rural to urban, in wealthy neighborhoods and poor ones, focused on rigorous college-prep curricula and school-to-work vocational strands.
Critics contend that the DOE’s master plan is too topdown, depriving principals, especially, of full authority over unique campuses that they know best. For them, it’s a fundamental question of educational philosophy: Should the state office exist to serve the needs of individual schools, or must the schools conform to the broad dictates of the state office?
Matayoshi and Assistant Superintendent Stephen Schatz, who leads the DOE’s Office of Strategic Reform, sat down with the Star-Advertiser’s editorial board last week for a status report, as it were, and a look ahead. Here are a few highlights of the 90-minute conversation:
» High stakes: The 2014-15 school year marks the second year of full implementation of the national Common Core standards, and the first year that results from the Smarter Balanced Assessment will count. This assessment, to be taken this coming school year by students in grades 3-8 and grade 11, is billed as a more rigorous and relevant test aligned to the new standards. One version of the assessment will be administered on an optional basis in December to give students a chance to familiarize themselves with the format, and another will be required in March, when the results will count. Matayoshi and Schatz said there is no danger that teachers will "teach to the test," because, like the NAEP,the new assessment includes questions that integrate content across the curriculum. "With a high-quality assessment like this, children who learn the curriculum will do well," said Schatz. "It’s not about prep." The test will cover English-language arts and math, and the public is being invited to review test questions.
» Impact on teachers and students: Even some ardent supporters of the Common Core and the standardized tests that go with it, developed to measure whether students are meeting the national standards, caution that it is too early to link students’ standardized test results with teachers’ pay, tenure and other employment issues — as Hawaii is set to do starting this school year. The Gates Foundation, a major driver of the national educational reform, has urged school districts to wait two more years before taking test results into account in high-stakes decisions such teacher evaluation or student promotion.
Matayoshi, however, said that based on implementation so far, which has included Common Core training for thousands of teachers in Hawaii’s unique, single school district, she is confident the DOE can move ahead fairly and on schedule. "Obviously, this is an important issue that we are following carefully, but our situation is different in Hawaii and Ibelieve we are well prepared," she said, adding that the DOE could adapt as necessary depending on technical advice from advisory panels that include major stakeholders. (Darrel Galera, the retired Moanalua High School principal who conducted the principals’ survey critical of the DOE’s direction, remains unconvinced. Using the Smarter Balanced Assessment "in this way, to help determine teachers’ pay, is basically an experiment. It’s a disservice to teachers and it’s a disservice to students.")
» Contractual conflict: While teachers’ pay and other employment are now linked to students’ test scores, principals’ pay is not — thanks to an arbitration ruling that handed educational officers including vice principals and principals healthy annual raises without the pay-for-performance element that the teachers’ union had agreed to. This inequity continues to vex teachers, especially, but Matayoshi is looking on the bright side. While discussion outside the school system tends to focus on punitive aspects of evaluation systems, the truth is "we are not looking to fire teachers, we are looking to hire them and support them in their continued employment … The same is true of principals. So if you look at (the evaluation systems) from that perspective, they’re not incompatible."
» Internal investigations: A point of contention highlighted in the critical survey was that there are a number of Department of Education employees who are accused of wrongdoing and linger on paid leave, with their cases unresolved for months or even years — meaning the innocent have no chance to clear their names and the guilty are paid by the taxpayers long after they should have been officially removed from their positions. Matayoshi acknowledged that this remains an ongoing issue for the department, although she said she is doing what she can to speed the pace of active investigations, given limited resources. About 50 DOE employees remain on such status, she said, although she could not quantify the total cost to the department.
» Other issues: Huge needs loom for the growing school system, which has added 5,000 students since 2007-08 but received essentially flat funding from the state. Educational technology for students at the school campus level and upgrades to technical systems at the district and state level are among the priorities. The DOE’s outdated electronic student information system is no longer supported by the vendor, for example, and the department is relying on an ongoing maintenance contract to keep the vital system running. "It’s a discontinued model," said Matayoshi.
Reflecting on the past few years of intensive reform, Matayoshi says that "the workload was tremendous, for everybody. Those were really hard years." She makes no apologies for the department’s goals and strategies, though, and encourages teachers and principals to stay the course. "What we’re saying is: you’ve seen the scope of (the reform initiatives). Now we just have to keep at it, focusing on quality and doing it well."
Critics are keeping up their work, too, as they try to persuade Board of Education members to turn the department upside down, and let principals, teachers, parents and students decide what is best for their individual schools.
Matayoshi met with Galera and long-time community activist Randy Roth, a law professor at the University of Hawaii, after the BOE rebuffed the bid they mounted, along with others, to end her tenure atop the DOE.
"I would like to believe that the superintendent ‘gets it’ and any changes she is initiating now are more than just an attempt to make it look as though schools are going to be more empowered in the future," said Roth. "After having talked to her at length, Ihave very serious doubts that she even understands the depth and seriousness of the principals’ concerns as expressed in the principals’ survey."
