New legislation offers hope of improving public schools

I have worked in and around the Department of Education for more than 40 years, as a teacher, vice principal and principal.

I now serve as a volunteer commissioner for the Hawaii Public Charter School Commission, and as a consultant helping elementary schools prepare for their first accreditation.

Despite all the substantial support I received from colleagues and supervisors, it has always been my students who truly shaped me as an educator.

It troubles me greatly that it is the students who are destined to suffer the consequences of what I perceive to be a newly minted dysfunctional system of public education in Hawaii.

It began with top-down dictates that were supposed to send us “racing to the top” in a few short years.

The package of reforms included national standards, a dramatic increase in non-diagnostic standardized testing, and high-stakes formulistic assessment mechanisms for principals and teachers.

The word from above was, “Do exactly what we tell you to do, or else.”

Curriculum decisions traditionally made by teams of classroom teachers are now routinely made by experts from central administration and national consulting firms. Never mind the unique needs of a particular school.

Professional educators in the schools have lost almost all autonomy in decisionmaking about the core mission of providing instruction to students.

Even worse, schools have increasingly and predictably restructured around non-diagnostic, standardized testing schedules. Subject areas that cannot be tested this way are de-emphasized, even eliminated. Life in the schools now revolves around the next test. Even kindergarten teachers are doing “test prep” with their students.

Principals are spending countless days in training sessions, learning little more than how to comply with the new dictates. Gone is training in instructional leadership — or any kind of leadership. In some schools relationships have become fractured because of a bureaucratic expectation that things “just get done” — never mind that the teachers and principals believe that the changes are disserving the children.

Most frightening to me is that the system has increasingly been recruiting, training and managing new principals in a top-down, command-and-control brand of management.

I worry that we are forgetting that public education is all about people; it is not a business. Children are precious; they should never be treated like widgets on an assembly line.

A great education begins with well-rounded teachers who model in their own actions the skills and characteristics they would like students to develop.

Yet top-down management is disempowering school-level professionals and punishing them for anything but blind compliance.

This creates a follow-the-script culture in the schools that is the exact opposite of what we should be modeling for the children.

The children see how principals and teachers work with one another, and they sense when adults are saying one thing — “be inquisitive, think critically and take personal responsibility” — but then meekly function in a dysfunctional system that disrespects them and limits their ability to do what they know is best for their students.

There is reason for hope, however: Congress has just passed legislation affecting our nation’s public schools and especially the federal government’s control over public education at the state and district levels.

It is an opportunity to shift our mindset from “The feds are making us do it” to “What can we do that will be most meaningful for our students?”

Plus, we now have a governor and chairman of the state Board of Education who both recognize that a wrong turn was taken, and that corrective action begins with school empowerment.

Now is the time to recognize that educational leadership is not power over schools and students.

Rather, it is giving power to those in schools to make the decisions that work best for the students in each unique school.

Catherine Payne was principal of Olomana School then Farrington High School, and received the National Milken Award. She will be a speaker at Sunday’s Hawaii School Empowerment Conference at the Hawaii Convention Center: edthinktankhawaii.org.