There’s a classic line from the movie "Die Hard," after several Federal Bureau of Investigation agents take over from the local constabulary to corral some terrorists and manage only to blow themselves up:

"Guess we need more FBI guys," one of the locals comments.

A parallel can be drawn that started with federal intervention in Hawaii’s public schools — only instead of more FBI guys, bills have been introduced to authorize the state to spend $14 million to hire more vice principals for teacher evaluations.

The parallel?

More FBI guys supposedly needed to cover the okoles of local cops, and more vice principals supposedly needed to handle a fatally flawed teacher evaluation system that resulted from interference by the feds.

Taxpayers are likely to grow more disenchanted with our education reformers as the cost totals start rolling in on how much exactly is being spent achieving highly debatable results.

This morass began in August 2010, when Gov. Neil Abercrombie bit at the $75 million carrot being dangled by the feds to play ball with them, and thus support President Barack Obama’s "Race to the Top" education reform initiative.

The funds would come as a grant to pilot a radical program to improve the highest-risk schools in Hawaii.

The strings included allowing state Department of Education bureaucrats to fire everyone at schools deemed to be failing, principals included, and re-staffing as the all-knowing saw fit. Annual teacher evaluations also were included, along with the possibility that should classroom observations and standardized test scores go awry, so would the teacher’s careers.

Under the pilot, some observations ended up being done by someone other than an administrator at that school. There also would be instances where the observer would unknow- ingly observe a substitute.

Most would agree that such measures are draconian. No worries, we were told — these measures would be applied to just failing schools on the Waianae Coast. Only they were not. They were meant to act as a pilot for all of the state’s public schools. And now even the "blue-ribbon" schools are subject to annual evaluations based on subjective observations and unreliable standard- ized test scores.

Evaluation was the bone sticking in most teachers’ throats when it came to a new teachers contract. The devil was in the details — details that were not shared with most teachers.

The teachers eventually ratified a new contract that called for the annual evaluations without realizing the full import of what they were ratifying. They did it for the money, having been chiseled for years by the state when it came to salaries. Annual raises of 3 percent were won, and were quickly followed by buyers’ remorse.

What did we buy into? So dismayed are most, a record number of teachers are likely to leave the public schools, or the profession altogether, by the school year’s end.

In the meantime, it quickly becomes apparent that required were too many observations by too few observers, the principals and vice principals.

A nationally recognized educational reform expert recently told the DOE and Hawaii State Teachers Association that annual evaluations of everyone using the current model would be "overwhelming" and counter-productive. Perhaps more reasonable would be evaluations every three years, she said, more akin to the five-year cycle that had sufficed before reform. (What other professionals are subjected to extensive annual review?)

Principals who signed off on these twice-a-year observations of everybody are asking the same question: What did we buy into?

Expect early retirements.

What did we buy into? The Legislature should be asking the same question. Taxpayers will be.