The birth of a new public-education think tank in Hawaii represents the evolution of thought to action, as critics of Hawaii’s centralized Department of Education have galvanized current Board of Education members, DOE administrators, principals and teachers to find out more about reforms that would invest more authority in the educators actually interacting with students and parents at the school level.

The creation of the Education Institute of Hawaii rightly moves the subject of school empowerment squarely into the community realm, expanding a much-needed conversation that so far has occurred mainly within the Department of Education. This renewed focus on decentralizing the state office is overdue.

School empowerment means that the people closest to the students have the most say about how campuses are run. This philosophy aligns authority and accountability, and is achieved only when a school district operates with a high level of transparency, with ready access to information about financial, human and other resources.

The institute is exploring ways to help principals, teachers and parents achieve the common goal of helping each student thrive, and promises to conduct research that is independent, objective and nonpartisan. The organization must reach and uphold that high standard if it is to exert broad influence moving forward, given that its executive director and several board members have been among the most outspoken critics of the DOE’s current leadership and direction.

The outlook is promising. The group has amassed a diverse 27-member delegation that will spend fall break visiting school districts in Canada, California and Nevada that have reorganized in ways that measurably improve educational outcomes for students — or that have tried and failed to do so.

Learning from others’ setbacks may be as instructive as visiting districts that have successfully transformed themselves, especially for educators and administrators from Hawaii, who work for a single, state-funded school district that is unique in structure and the ninth-largest in the nation.

School empowerment efforts have progressed in fits and starts before in Hawaii, but never achieved full flight. The fact-finding mission should quickly bring DOE and BOE leadership up to speed on the importance of ensuring that the central office serves the schools’ needs, rather than the other way around, and propelling the broader conversation.

To that end, the delegation received some reading material ahead of the Oct. 6-10 trip, "10 Lessons from New York City Schools: What Really Works to Improve Education," which emphasizes how crucial it is to:

» Invest in leadership

» Devolve responsibility, resources and authority to schools

» Make everyone directly responsible and accountable for student performance

» Reward success and exact consequences for failure

» Create small schools

» Reduce teacher load

» Focus relentlessly on improving student learning

» Partner with the private sector

» Reform the central office

» Be bold!

On that penultimate point, the 2013 guide published by Columbia University’s Teachers College Press is unequivocal, asserting that "the most egregious error made by superintendents and school reformers is the attempt to reform schools without simultaneously reforming the central office."

Hawaii’s public schools have undergone massive changes over the past four years, involving everything from student assessments, to teacher accountability to curricular standards at the campus level. Redefining the role of the DOE’s central authority must be part of the transformation.