Column: Increase school empowerment, reduce DOE bureaucracy

School communities will soon receive financial information necessary to make fiscal decisions to benefit their local schools. As the model of what education looks like in 2021 and beyond continues to evolve, the time is past due to endow school-level staff with the power to finally be allowed to make all critical decisions benefiting their students.

The Education Institute of Hawaii believes it’s time for whole-system reformation of the Hawaii Department of Education (HIDOE) with the goal of exemplary public schools for our children. To that end, a major philosophical shift within HIDOE is necessary for meaningful change to occur.

Ideally, HIDOE, the state Legislature and school communities would agree that only two categories of HIDOE employees are needed: 1) employees who work directly with students, and 2) employees who support the efforts of those who work directly with students. In this empowerment model, those closest to the students make decisions on their behalf.

In an empowered school, teachers select the means and methods to achieve educational standards and policies. The staff knows the school’s detailed budget and, collectively, makes judgements on how its money will be spent. Empowered teachers are involved in many decisions made at the school level, and empowered school-level administrators have serious control over the school’s budget with the involvement of staff and community.

But school empowerment will not work if the HIDOE structure remains the same. Currently, the state-level administration retains the power to veto school decisions. The minds of our most precious resource, our keiki, are entrusted to school teachers and administrators. However, schools are not granted the same level of trust to make fiscal decisions on behalf of those students. When schools are not empowered, the end result is ineffective schools.

While the Hawaii Board of Education (HIBOE) contemplates restructuring the HIDOE, it can decide if it is really serious about restructuring the system in a way that will bring about meaningful change for our schools. Will it select a superintendent who will recruit staff committed to empowering schools? Will it put in place a superintendent who will allow school-level staff to make critical decisions on how to deliver instruction?

This kind of school empowerment envisions decentralized educational decision-making, as was proposed by former schools Superintendent Charlie Toguchi’s Project Ke Au Hou in the 1990s, which proposed eliminating the seven mid-level bureaucratic HIDOE district offices. However, over the past 30 years, the district offices have been replaced with 15 complex offices that have become just as bureaucratic. The HIDOE has doubled the mid-tier level bureaucracy instead of eliminating it.

Our unique state system has the potential to direct a statewide focus and offers some economies of scale by eliminating bureaucratic redundancies, such as employee contract negotiations, bus routes and lunch programs, to name a few.

However, the existing bureaucracy becomes problematic when a school needs something as simple as getting a toilet fixed and has to rely on HIDOE’s unnecessarily complex procedural layers that can take weeks to resolve a simple problem. Those same layers also require time-consuming compliance from the schools. The administrative support team can benefit from being leaner, with less mid-tier bureaucracy, and focused more on supporting, not directing, schools.

The HIBOE can put the right people in place; talk to HIDOE employees, unions, legislators and the community; and begin serious planning. The HIDOE can immediately involve school communities to determine what administrative decisions and functions can be appropriately relegated to the school level, and thus what complex and state positions might be reduced or eliminated.

With Hawaii already facing significant education issues, these actions — with your support — could maximize resources, minimize teacher cuts, increase transparency, and get long overdue results.

Ray L’Heureux is chairman/president and Joan Lee Husted is vice president of the Education Institute of Hawaii.