Does every teacher need an education degree?

A math teacher with an education degree is not automatically better than one with a degree in mathematics. In fact, some would argue that an instructor who holds a degree in the subject area he or she is teaching could be the stronger choice.

Hawaii’s Department of Education must put otherwise qualified teachers on more equal footing with education majors. As it stands now, theres’s a $12,000 gap in annual pay for beginning teachers; those with education degrees earn $45,000 a year, as compared to $33,000 for instructors who may have master’s degrees in their subject areas, but never majored in education. We’re not discounting pedagogy. But there is more than one way to develop the curricular expertise and classroom management skills that all truly great teachers share.

Reconnecting the Health Connector

Jeffrey Kissel, former president and CEO of HawaiiGas, has decided there’s one more challenge that awaits in the latter days of his executive career: finding a way to make the Hawaii Health Connector sustainable.

Kissel’s appointment as executive director of Hawaii’s nonprofit health insurance exchange was announced on Friday. He’s entering the agency soon after the exit of a major player, Hawaii Medical Service Association, from a major element of the Connector, its small-business insurance exchange. Sales from that were supposed to provide much of the revenue to sustain the exchange.

But if anyone can chart a better course for the agency, it’s likely to be someone from the private sector. Kissel said his first priority will be a strategic plan, once he gets all the financials clear.