You can make statistics say anything you want, the saying goes, but it’s hard to read much that’s good in the latest figures on Hawaii’s pandemic public education experience. They show kids struggling to keep up, given the limitations of online learning: It’s no substitute for the focused attention they get in the face-to-face classroom environment.

The state Department of Education collected data on student learning during the past year of the coronavirus pandemic, in which most children have been expected to do their studies from home, by internet connection if they had one.

And the top-line numbers are disturbing. In elementary school, 21% performed well below proficiency in English, and 15% fell short in math in the first semester of this school year.

Middle-school and high-school failing rates in at least one of the major subjects was 8% and 12%, respectively.

The lesson we are supposed to learn from failure is supposed to be to try harder — in this case, on behalf of the kids. But there seems to be little sense of urgency to get these children back to campus, to something approaching normalcy, in time to salvage part of this academic year.

Instead, appallingly, there’s been a battle between education officials and an alliance of the teachers union and lawmakers. They have advanced House Bill 613 and Senate Bill 270, measures that seek to compel the DOE and Board of Education to reserve any federal dollars they have to spend first to safeguard unionized faculty and staff positions.

Those measures should be shelved.

What should be absolutely the preeminent concern — getting the schools ready to welcome back children in far greater numbers this academic year — has slipped to a lower tier. That’s indefensible. Correcting the distressing student achievement level, a deficit that gets harder to erase with each passing day, will require teamwork and leadership from the top.

This especially means the top floor of the state Capitol.

Gov. David Ige needs to quickly convene officials from the state Department of Health, the DOE and BOE and the public employee unions — the Hawaii State Teachers Association, the Hawaii Government Employees Association and United Public Workers. And in the coming days, the parties need to set aside their individual constituencies and unite behind the one they have in common: public school students.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued revised guidance for reopening schools. The state Health Department should clarify and interpret that guidance for application to Hawaii schools — which, after all, are situated in communities with a diminishing count of COVID-19 cases. And teachers rightly have been moved ahead in line to receive the vaccine, which reduces the risk of reopening campuses even further.

The final product of the governor’s conference must be a plan that will lay down the pathway for reopening schools by the time the fourth quarter starts after spring break in mid-March, and for providing the remedial learning for those who already are lagging far behind.

Of course, top education officials don’t deny that supplemental work is necessary. They can’t.

Catherine Payne, the retired teacher and principal who now chairs the school board, cited some parents she knows whose children are well-equipped at home and will make up for lost time fairly easily.

“It’s the kids that we know are not able to cope as well that we really need to target,” Payne said. “And we haven’t even found all those kids.” Those are the students, she said, who have failed to log in for their online classes, and who are losing touch with their teachers.

This brings us back to the issues raised in HB 613 and SB 270. The HSTA and legislative education leaders have taken issue with $50 million in federal pandemic relief aid the DOE wants to spend on tutors to help fallen-behind students. In hearings last week, HSTA President Corey Rosenlee pointed to fears that deep cuts to public schools will lead to devastating job losses and pay cuts among teachers.

If either bill is enacted, it would direct the DOE to spend its federal money to keep the unionized staff pay whole.

There’s reason to hope an additional federal bailout for local governments will help the state avert these cuts. Even so, it’s unclear whether the bills’ spending mandate would pass muster with the federal government, Payne said: State and local education agencies — the DOE and BOE, respectively — are supposed to direct the spending, not the Legislature.

However, she said, educators do agree that the most effective solution would be deploying the children’s own teachers and other local support resources in their communities to bridge the learning gaps.

The bottom line is that solutions are needed now, said U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, who added that most parties concur on least one point.

“We need to open schools as soon as possible,” Schatz said. “If we don’t get started right away, then we’re going to lose the fourth quarter.”

Governor, that simply should not be allowed — not when kids have lost so much already.