Payne is guiding Hawaii’s charter schools to greater accountability

Catherine Payne has been chairwoman of the state Public Charter School Commission since 2013, a year after it started, and the volunteer position hasn’t been without its drama.

The commission’s first executive director, Tom Hutton, recently resigned — his last day on the job is today — partly because of resistance he had been receiving from some charter school officials who oppose some of the mandates of the commission. The commission was created to bring greater accountability to Hawaii’s charter schools, of which there are 34 covering about 10,000 students. Payne said she hopes to have a replacement for Hutton by July.

Initially a board member, then its vice chairwoman, Payne joined the commision just a couple of years after retiring from a long, impressive career as a teacher, vice principal and principal with the state Department of Education. The multi-award-winning educator had been principal of Farrington High School for 15 years when she quit in 2010 for health reasons.

“I really retired because I was ill,” she said. “I had had cancer, like, three times. And the last time I just didn’t bounce back as quickly, and I thought it’s not fair to the school. I needed to let somebody else take that, and I needed to get well. And I have. I’m fine. But after a few months it was like, OK, I just can’t sit here. I gotta do something.”

So she became a consultant with a firm that helps public schools with their accreditations, joined the several education-related nonprofit boards, became a mentor to students at the University of Hawaii College of Education, and joined the charter school commission of nine board members and 15 staffers.

Payne, 64, has lived in Hawaii continuously since 1971. Her parents had moved here from California in 1968, and she occasionally visited them. She finished high school at an Episcopal boarding school for girls, Bishop’s School, in La Jolla, in 1969, then attended University of California at Davis for a year.

“I thought, ‘Gee, my parents are living in Hawaii and I’m up here in Sacramento,’” Payne recalled. “So I decided I would just come to UH, and it changed my life.”

She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees and did doctoral studies in education all at UH, and started with the DOE in 1974 as a teacher at Nanakuli High and Intermediate School.

Among her awards was “National Educator” from the Milken Family Foundation in 1995 and “Hawaii Secondary Principal of the Year” by the National Association of Secondary School Principals in 1991.

QUESTION: So what’s up with the State Public Charter School Commission right now since Tom Hutton, the executive director of the last three years, quit under what seems to be less-than ideal circumstances? My impression is that he gottired of the unprofessional behavior of some of the people at the charter schools; is that right?

ANSWER: That’s part of it.

One thing I want to make really clear is he did a tremendously wonderful job for us as the charter school leader at a very hard time. We did not ask for his resignation, in case there’s anything that’s out there that’s giving that impression. Wewere really sad that he’s leaving.

However, we also understand, because in the kind of position that he came into, the expectation was, and very, very clear from the Legislature and the board at that time, that we needed somebody who could implement the massive changes inthe law that completely restructured charter schools as we knew them in Hawaii.

And whenever you have a leader that is charged with doing that, he’s also the person who’s going to take the hits from everybody who doesn’t want the changes. And he did it with grace, and he did it with a real calm demeanor that justamazed me.

But, you know, I’ve been in leadership for a long time and I know that you have to remain calm on the outside, even if you’re taking a lot of hits, and he did, but it does take its toll on you. And now that … we’ve got things ready to moveforward to the next step … he saw this as a time to make a break and let somebody new come who can take it to the next level.

I think he recognized, too, that he was kind of a target for all the schools that saw him as the face of change — a face of change they did not like. So now we’ll be looking for someone to come in … (and) help us move forward, because the lawis still what it is and we need to continue to do what we were charged with doing as a commission.

Q: What are fundamental changes, basically, that upset everybody?

A: OK. Back in the early ’90s, when charter schools began, the first idea was that we would change existing schools into charters. That’s the era when Waialae and Lanikai and a few other schools over the years just converted to charter.

Then we began more of a grassroots kind of local charter school, where people had a great idea of how a school might be, so then they got together. … It was very, very much a free-for-all and pretty much anybody who wanted to start acharter school did.

Some of them have done extremely well. Some of them have not. But there was no system for really evaluating them. … They started the school, they got a per-pupil amount from the state. Some of the early ones got even a lot of start-upmoney that dried out. But they were kind of just left on their own.

But then people began to notice that things were not going well in a number of schools. Some of it was related to ethics, some of it was related to finance, and sometimes ethics and finance came together. And some of it was just that the kidswere not doing well academically. … There was no way to really monitor this.

This was when I was still employed as a principal. We really didn’t know, in our regular public school sector, anything about what was going on with charter schools. But we’d read things in the paper and it was like “My goodness.”

But a little bit after a I retired, … (state Sen.) Jill Tokuda really leading the legislative piece of it, Don Horner and the Board of Education, and others in the charter school community, kind of came together, along with the National Association ofCharter School Authorizers, and they came into Hawaii and rewrote the charter school law, Act 130, using a lot of the national principles on charter school authorizing, but changing it really to fit a more of a Hawaii way of doing things as muchas possible. … The new charter commission would authorize schools based on very strict criteria, and would monitor schools based on contracts that dealt with their operations, their finances and their academics.

It’s a really long law, but that’s basically it, and the law explicitly says no technical support shall be provided by the authorizer, because if you give them support and write things up for them, then you’re also evaluating (what you’ve done).

Q: Are you talking about how the previous organization, the Charter Schools Review Panel, supposedly not only authorized these schools but also advocated for them?

A: Yes. The Charter Schools Review Panel was an advocacy group. The side piece to the review panel was the Charter School Administrative Office, and in that office there were people whose job it was to help the schools.

Q: What kind of help?

A: I wasn’t around, so I’m kind of guessing, but I think it was more technical — if schools needed help with writing their federal plans for federal monies, or if they needed help with their budgets, you know, like putting a budget together.

Q: (So the new commission) is focused only on standards that can be monitored?

A: Yes. … But the commission continues to be, the receptacle of resources that are then doled out to the schools. The money doesn’t go from the state directly to the schools. … And our financial people and our academic performance people,they go and help (the schools), not so much with developing plans and making suggestions for how they should be running things, but helping them to understand what they’re being evaluated on, helping them to understand the contracts,asking critical questions. … And, in fact, because we have the federal programs people in our office, they are very helpful to the schools. They will go out and help them as much as they can. …

So as much as we can stretch that idea of support, we have, but we really don’t have either the authority or the staff to provide the kind of support that the Department of Education has (for regular public schools).

Q: Have things improved since the change?

A: Well, one of our schools is the highest performing middle school in the state, Voyager (Public Charter School). We’re seeing, I think, a trend upward in most of our schools. But there are some that are really struggling. The contracts are notgoing to be evaluated until … well, they have, like, three more years until the end of their newest contracts.

Q: They all signed up for three years?

A: Well, that’s the big issue right now. Some of them are hoping that with Tom leaving, and with the board taking a look at things, that somehow that they’re going to be able to do away with some of the provisions in the contracts. I don’tthink that’s going to happen because they’ve already been passed, and the implementation will start July 1.

Q: Ultimately, what were people mad about with Tom Hutton — just this issue of how long they could go for a contract?

A: He’s just a face of this change, and he was the one out there saying these are the standards you’re going to have to meet, and it was very hard for some people to accept it, because you’re used to not having anybody look closely at whatyou’re doing, and that was the idea of going into a charter, because then you wouldn’t have the oversight.

They don’t have to follow the procurement laws, for example. And they don’t have to follow as precisely the employment laws. They do have to have teachers who are licensed, but they can also create other kinds of positions in their schoolsthat other schools don’t have, and pay people at a rate that they would like to pay them.

So it’s much freer, and for schools that are led by somebody who really knows what they’re doing, and understands the bigger laws that we all have to follow, these schools have done some amazing things.

But it’s where they either have not known or hoped they could get away with some of the things that have been questionable — the family hires, the overpayments of people for only working part-time and getting paid full-time, those kinds ofthings — that have caused added scrutiny that they’re not comfortable with.

The Ethics Commission has looked at some schools regarding purchasing, because you know, even though you’re free from procurement rules, you still have conflicts of interests if you have an employee with a company and you’re buyingthings from that employee’s company. Those are things that have happened and that we have looked at, and we have angered people because we have questioned those things.

Q: It’s always seemed to me that charter schools are better than public schools because, in theory at least, there’s more hands-on management by people who really care, the parents or whomever. But I think there’s still a lot of confusionabout how charter schools differ exactly from private schools. Does it have to do with the public money, or what?

A: Yeah, well, certainly it’s public money. They also cannot take only kids they want to take, like a private school can. They can’t interview and say, “OK, you’re a good fit for us and you can come in.” They really have to take anybody who wantsto come, including special education, up to a point of their maximum enrollment.

If they’re a conversion school, like Waialae, Lanikai, Kamaile Academy, they have to take the students in their attendance district. So if you want to go to that school, you need to live in the area, and usually those schools have to hold lotteries.

Other charter schools also have more students than they have seats for, so they have to do a lottery statewide. If they’re not a conversion school, they have to be open to any student in the state who wants to come — ELL (English-languagelearners), special ed., …

One of the things we’ve come to a conclusion about, in my discussions with the BOE chair, and even with Tom as he’s exiting, is we still need to do a much better job of helping the community understand what charter schools are all about — inaddition to helping our own charter school leaders understand that.

But I really do feel that there’s a strong support in the community for this oversight, because it’s public money, and when they read things in the paper about things that have been done with charter school money that is so wrong, we havesupport for making sure this doesn’t happen. And if it requires more scrutiny of how they are managing things at the schools, people shouldn’t be afraid of that, because we’re not telling them what kind of curriculum they have to put intoplace or who they need to hire, but we are telling that you must have certain outcomes that are ethical and proper for children.

Q: What kinds of interests are represented in those charter schools?

A: Well, we have a group of Hawaiian immersion schools, where everything is taught in Hawaiian up until fifth grade, … and then the beginnings of English until graduation, but still the main focus is to perpetuate the Hawaiian language.

Then we have some Hawaiian-focused schools that are not immersion. They teach Hawaiian language, but they also teach Hawaiian culture, and classes other than Hawaiian language are taught in English.

Then the rest of the schools usually have some kind of theme around the way they teach. Like the SEEQs — School for Examining Essential Questions. That one is in Kaimuki, and they have developed around questions.

Q: Like a Socratic kind of deal?

A: Yes. And they do project-based studies there. That was one of the first schools our new commission authorized and I’m very excited about it.