The Education Institute of Hawaii (EIH) contends that too few students and educators are thriving in the state’s public K-12 schools system. Much of the problem, as the nonprofit sees it, is due to statewide one-size-fits-all practices that prevent pinpointing and addressing unique needs.

The institute, led by former Hawaii Department of Education administrators and seasoned educators, says it wants to serve as a catalyst for transforming leadership throughout the system by way of school empowerment, meaning that each school should have the power, resources and responsibility to deliver student success.

Key to this compelling vision is fiscal transparency. Or as EIH’s president, Ray L’Heureux, who served as an assistant DOE superintendent of facilities from 2012 to 2014, recently put it, “It has to start with, ‘Where’s the money?’”

EIH wants to track the flow of public education dollars at a granular level. That’s a reasonable — and applause-worthy — aim, given that the DOE’s annual budget of nearly $3 billion (an operating budget of about $2 billion and $1 billion in other expenses) is, of course, taxpayer money.

The public should be afforded a clear picture of how each school is financed at the classroom level. Right now, that picture is fuzzy, in part, due to the system’s structure as well as a provision in the state’s public records law.

Hawaii has 257 schools but only one school district — the sole statewide district in the nation. By comparison, Delaware, which has about 224 schools, is divided into 44 school districts — each governed by an elected school board that oversees spending and various policy matters. An empowerment-driven, bottom-up philosophy is more likely to flourish in the multiple-district structure.

Also blurring the picture is the Uniform Information Practices Act. Rather than requiring disclosure of public employees’ to-the-dollar salary figures, it apparently limits release to monetary ranges based on job title.

Up against full-transparency obstacles, EIH has spent the last three years requesting and collecting schools budget-related data to organize into a database that seeks to show detailed accounting that the public can easily grasp.

However, in a recent Star-Advertiser story by education reporter Susan Essoyan, L’Heureux rightly said that released 2017 revenue and expenditure data lacked sufficient detail. While the 2017 financial audit shows total expenditures of $2.8 billion, the department provided EIH with expenditures totaling $1.8 billion.

Omitting $1 billion from the spending picture is unacceptable. DOE has explained that the discrepancy covers spending by state agencies that are not part of the department’s Financial Management System. Among the items in that lineup: fringe benefits paid centrally by the state, such as pensions, health insurance for employees and retirees.

State leaders should direct release of some form of data that offers, at least, a glimpse of financial accounting tied to the $1 billion in question. Such omission can erode public trust — something the DOE needs to maintain as it addresses long-standing challenges, such as classroom teacher shortages.

Gov. David Ige has repeatedly voiced support for empowering individual schools so that teachers and principals can make more decisions on curriculum and expenditures at their campuses. EIH’s data-sorting effort is one way to help move forward that objective.

Amid the tug-of-war over data, EIH, which has hired a Pennsylvania-based business analysis firm to perform the proposed fiscal transparency study, should not let perfection be the enemy of the good. For the sake of more efficient and effective schools, even partial strides count as movement in the right direction.