Schools Our Keiki Deserve

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Schools Our Keiki Deserve report, composed by the HSTA Speakers Bureau (2016).

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SCHOOLS OUR
KEIKI DESERVE
From the HSTA Speakers Bureau

Public education in Hawai‘i has the potential power to democratize
and make our society more equal, fair, and just.   The teacher
leaders of the Hawai‘i State Teachers Association think that public
education policy should accordingly be designed, developed,
and assessed in as democratic a fashion as possible.  This report,
which emerged from conversations and forums with public school
teachers in every chapter and on every island of the state of Hawai‘i,
represents the contribution of teachers to the public conversation
about public education. We seek to raise awareness about what is
happening in our schools and to advocate changes that will restore
ola (well-being), lokahi (balance), pono (fairness), and aloha (care)
to state education policy in Hawai‘i.
This report is a result of a long process of continuing internal
dialogue within our association. In member-to-member forums
facilitated through a statewide “listening tour,” teachers engaged
in a common process to move from a ‘language of critique’ to a
‘language of hope’ and possibility.   In these forums, teacher
participants engaged in extended discussion of the problems facing
public education, the exacerbation of these issues by the recent
education ‘reform’ policies (i.e., No Child Left Behind and Race

to the Top), and the possibilities for change presently available.
They considered major continuing trends, novel emerging issues,
and significant continuities from the past.  Teacher participants
used this analysis to ‘envision their preferred futures,’ and provided
feedback that the state leadership used to develop the shared vision
of the association and to determine the most effective strategy to
move towards our shared preferred future.
The most important concepts informing this shared vision for
our preferred future for public education in Hawai‘i are ola (wellbeing), lokahi (balance), pono (fairness), and aloha (care). Teachers
want schools to promote the development and well-being of the
whole student, intellectually, physically, spiritually, and socially
(ola).   They think that educational policy should be designed
around recognition of the vital interdependence and need for
balance of all of these aspects of development, within each student
and the community as a whole (lokahi).  They argued that public
education policy should cultivate the individual talents and potential
of all students, whatever their circumstances, and respect the roles
and responsibilities of those who work with them (pono).  And,
most importantly, they argued that sound public education policy

should create optimal conditions for students’ development, based
on compassion, experience, and practical wisdom (aloha/malama).
The “Schools Our Keiki Deserve” campaign is our first step in the
effort to realize this vision.
In this shared preferred future, public schools become a primary
site of public investment structured around visions of equity and
excellence, and the resources and facilities available for learning
reflect the high value accorded to the knowledge shared with
future generations. There were four main purposes of public
education identified by teacher participants: economic, cultural,
social, and personal. Educators recognized the importance of
enabling students to become economically responsible and
independent.  Teachers also emphasized the role of public education
in helping students understand and appreciate their own cultures
and respect the diversity of others.  The social function of public
education, teachers argued, is to support students in becoming
active and compassionate citizens. And public education should
have a personal impact: it should serve the students themselves, to
contribute not simply to their ‘happiness’ but ultimately, to student
‘flourishing’.   This redefinition of the purposes of education
centers the process on “opening the world to more questions,
to deeper uncertainties, to shared and contested meanings, to
community engagement, to imagination, action and joy.”[1]

When the primary desired social good or outcome is the
development of human potential rather than economic growth, the
entire design of education is transformed. There is a shift in two
main areas, the first of which is the desire to learn and willingness
to be creatively challenged. With a focus on embracing challenges,
students and educators alike build upon their areas of strength
and welcome the opportunity to explore areas in which they might
not feel as comfortable.   As adults, students will

Public

education in
Hawai‘i has the
potential pow
er to democ
ratize and
make our so
ciety more
equal, fair,
and just. W
hen the prim
ary desired
social good
or outcom
e is the
development
of human
potential
rather
than
economic
growth,
the entire
design of ed
ucation is
transformed
.

SCHOOLS OUR
KEIKI DESERVE
Public schools play a critical role in any kind of democratic political
system and should serve as centers of community and collaborative
learning.  The first implication of this renewed emphasis on the
public schools as centers for community building is a shift in the
understanding of the purposes of public goods and resources. The
purpose of education is to provide opportunities for young people
to explore what it means to be fully human.  Young people need
support and guidance in discovering who they are, as humans, in
relation to others, and in exploring different ways of expressing
themselves and developing meaningful relationships with the
world around them.  Young people should be given opportunities
to acquire a wider rather than narrower range of skills, because
all members of society need a range of knowledge and capacities,
broad and deep enough to know how to further that knowledge
should they so desire. Public schools in Hawai‘i should educate
children so that they can be effective and reasonable participants
in public decision-making, and, perhaps most importantly, so that
they understand the intrinsic value of intellectual pursuits to serve
the ends of life-enhancement.

need to be able to critically and creatively grapple with overlapping
ecological, economic and political crises. A second important
capacity that will be developed as a result of this shift is the
willingness to use political participation through legal channels to
raise questions about social problems and to achieve justice. This
is critical as we move towards shared challenges: students need
to develop the ability to engage in public reasoning in a spirit of
mutual respect and willingness to listen.
The public school teachers of Hawai‘i seek to reclaim public
education for public purposes. In the following pages, we attempt
to raise awareness about what is happening in our schools and
to advocate changes that will restore ola (well-being), lokahi
(balance), pono (fairness), and aloha (care) to state education
policy in Hawai‘i. But this is just the beginning.  Teachers are and
have always been powerful advocates on behalf of the young people
of our communities and partners with their families. We look
forward to continuing to build relationships with our communities
to strengthen our public schools, to help create the schools our
keiki deserve.

WHOLE CHILD EDUCATION
Our keiki come to school with a diverse set of experiences,
talents, cultural knowledge, and questions to be explored.[1] To
be authentic and positive places of learning, schools should engage
children’s natural curiosity and creativity, and provide students with
opportunities to better understand themselves in relation to their
local, national, and global communities.[2]

Education Designed to Spark
Curiosity and Creativity
All students in Hawai‘i deserve access to a world-class education,
not just those of the social and economic elite. At Punahou
School, students in the Junior School (K – 8) enjoy the benefits
of a sequenced, inquiry-based curriculum, in which students in
each grade explore issues of global sustainability. The curriculum
features spiraling instruction in language arts, global languages,
science, math, social studies, physical education, music, art,
technology, and outdoor education, all focused on creativity and
critical thinking.[3] At ‘Iolani School, in the new Sullivan Center
for Innovation and Leadership (a sustainably-designed 40,000
square foot, four-story facility) students are engaged in projectbased inquiry connecting citizenship, applied technology, scientific
discovery, and digital communication.   This Center includes a
fabrication lab, a rooftop garden, a digital media lab, flexible project
spaces, collaboration classrooms, and a research lab, all designed to
cultivate 21st century learning skills.[4] The curriculum, learning
activities, and assessments in these private schools, because they are
not constrained by the same ‘accountability’ measures that currently
narrow and impoverish the learning possibilities in Hawai‘i public
schools, are designed to maximize student curiosity, engagement,
and learning.

Implications of the Current
Hawai‘i Public School Model
In Hawai‘i public schools, on the other hand, the adoption of
‘standards-based accountability’ measures has had the effect
of generally putting far too much emphasis on instruction in
preparation for high-stakes standardized testing, narrowly focused
on mathematics and language arts. As a result, most of our
elementary students now have much more limited learning time
and resources devoted to physical education, arts education (music,
drama, art, dance, choir, band, etc.), rich and authentic social studies
education, Hawaiian studies, library/media instruction, scientific
inquiry, or project-based learning designed to cultivate curiosity and
creativity.[5] There are, however, culture-based teaching approaches
currently being developed in Hawai‘i that support a more holistic
vision of education designed to cultivate curiosity, creativity, and

connection with the community focused on nurturing strong
teachers, integrated teaching, and whole schools.[6]   Teachers
should be supported in exercising mindfulness that enables them
to be fully present for and supportive of their students, rather
than being driven by fear of test scores in their decision-making.
Integrated teaching “links individual subjects, instructional units,
and lessons to their larger meaning; helps students see connections
incorporating a variety of instructional approaches,” and whole
schools act as “sanctuaries in which students and teachers feel a
deep sense of community and acceptance.”[7]

Current Socio-Economic
Contextual Challenges
Attentiveness to the ‘whole child’ requires not only a broadening
of the curriculum but also a willingness to examine the particular
struggles faced by the students in our public schools.   Although
the particular expression of these struggles varies across the
state, HIDOE students in public schools generally come from
less privileged ethnic and social class backgrounds than their
counterparts in private schools: a full 52% of the student population
in Hawai‘i public schools come from ‘economically disadvantaged’
households, those which meet the income eligibility guidelines
for free or reduced-price meals (less than or equal to 185% of
Federal Poverty Guidelines).[8] Hawai‘i public schools serve
students from a unique blend of races, cultures, and experiences. In
school year 2013-2014, Native Hawaiians constituted the largest
group of students in the Hawai‘i public school system, making up
26% of the population, while Filipino Americans made up 22%,
whites 17%, Japanese Americans 9%, Micronesians 4%, Latinos
3.8%, Samoans 3.5% and Chinese Americans 3.2%; our HIDOE
teaching population, on the other hand, is primarily white and
Japanese-American.[9] Addressing the social justice implications
of this disparity will require that we take seriously the importance
of ‘growing our own teachers’ within our communities, young
leaders who understand and want to serve their communities.
While there are differences within and between these groups of
students, there are also important social indicators that suggest that
our failure to attend to the ‘whole child’ does not serve us well as
a community. Taken together, students of Hawaiian, Filipino, and
other Pacific Islander descent make up the majority, about 55%,
of our public school students.  These same groups of students
are extremely underrepresented at the major institution of higher
education in Hawai‘i, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Moreover,
according to the results of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey,
conducted every two years by the Center for Disease Control, the
students in Hawai‘i public schools report persistent and increasingly
trenchant problems of poor nutrition, lack of physical activity,
obesity, drug and alcohol abuse, bullying, and sexual exploitation.

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[10]   Without approaching education in a more
holistic fashion, we cannot hope to address these physical, social,
and economic barriers to learning.

Culture-Based Education and
Culturally Relevant Education
Given the history of these islands, our public schools should be

places that feel uniquely Hawaiian, reflecting the rich
history and cultures that make our islands different than
anywhere else in the world. Children should have the
opportunity to learn about Polynesian and Hawaiian
cultural traditions and actively practice Hawaiian
language, arts, and customs. Our state constitution
acknowledges the importance of Hawaiian language and
culture, and we need to ensure that our public schools
actually preserve and promote the language and culture
of this place. Doing so in ways that helps students in our
very ethnically diverse society connect with their own
cultures and social identities, accepting and celebrating students for
who they are – as opposed to what they do – is integrally related
to the idea of teaching the ‘whole child.’ And while it is critical
that our approach to education reflect the host culture, we also
need to foster culturally relevant education for all of our students,
a pedagogical approach grounded in teachers’ display of cultural
competence and skill at teaching in a cross-cultural or multicultural
setting, enabling each and every student to relate course content to
his or her cultural context, which produces significant benefits for
all students.[11]

Hawai‘i’s public schools serve many vulnerable groups of young
people, including economically disadvantaged students,
many
students with special needs and English Language Learners.
schools, as
IDOE
H
e
m
While about 13% of the total student population (about
In so
ts have
our studen
180,000 students) falls into more than one group, students
of
d
ir
th
as a
(IEPs).
from these three groups taken together make up a solid
lans
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n
io
at
c
du
E
Individual
majority, or 56%, of our student population.[1] About 52%,
n
rs are ofte
ation teache
uc
or 92,808, of our students are economically disadvantaged;
ed
l
ia
c
pe
S
work, lack
10%, or 17,373, of our students have special needs; and
with paper
d
ne
de
r
bu
over
about 8%, or 13,883, of our students are English Language
ividualized
complete Ind
to
e
m
ti
te
ua
Learners (ELL).[2] If public education is to be a space in
adeq
ck
tasks, and la
)
P
(IE
which we can restore ola (well-being), lokahi (balance), pono
n
la
P
n
io
Educat
erials
(fairness), and aloha (care), we need to begin by addressing the
learning mat
r
fo
s
nd
fu
sufficient
needs of those students who are most vulnerable.
t.
and equipmen

Special Education

Special education instruction meets the unique needs of students
with disabilities. Special education services include academic,
speech-language, psychological, physical and occupational, and
counseling accommodations. Governed by the federal Individuals
with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEA)
and state regulations requiring the Hawai‘i State Department of
Education to provide a free, appropriate public education (FAPE)
to eligible students, special education services are made available
to any student aged 3 to 22 who demonstrates a need for specially
designed instruction.[3]        
Despite reform efforts over the past fifteen years, special
education in Hawai‘i requires additional support. Most students
with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) in Hawai‘i

documentation for one-to-one services (i.e., Skills
Trainer), or completing IEP reporting during the work day. In
addition, more than 60% of special education teachers did not receive
appropriate support services and workload support or additional
time to complete IEP reporting from school administrators.
In the 2010-2011 school year, due to a loss of federal funding,
the DOE discontinued the yearly supplemental supply funding
of $1,690 to special education teachers. As a result, 63% of the
teachers responding to the survey revealed they had not received
any separate SPED allocation from their school administrators
for supplies or curriculum, and more than 80% made out-ofpocket purchases to meet specific needs of their SPED students.
The loss of the $1,690 funding resulted in a lack of appropriate
learning materials and increased the teacher workload significantly
in order to replicate appropriate teaching materials. Improving the

SUPPORTING ALL
public schools are performing below grade level in reading and
mathematics as measured by statewide assessments. While most
of the public policy attention to these students has been focused
on the dramatically widening ‘achievement gap’ between special
education students and their general education peers, teachers of
special needs students are often much more concerned about the
psychological effects that the ‘toxic testing’ culture has had on these
students, and the ways in which students’ fundamental sense of
humanity and self-worth are increasingly undermined by our highly
pressurized and hypercompetitive public school culture.  
In some HIDOE schools, as many as a third of our students have
Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). Special education teachers
are often overburdened with paperwork, lack adequate time to
complete IEP tasks, and lack sufficient funds for learning materials
and equipment.   In a 2015 HSTA survey of special education
teachers in Hawai‘i, more than 70% of respondents reported they
were not given adequate time to plan for teaching, completing

educational experience for special education students requires that
we not only lessen the workload of special education teachers, but
also give special education teachers funding for classroom materials
that boost learning growth.

English Language Learners
According to the 2010 U.S. Census survey, over 25% of the
population in Hawai‘i speak a language other than English, and the
majority of people immigrating to Hawai‘i come from Asia and the
Pacific Islands. The top five foreign languages spoken by Hawai‘i
public school students are Ilokano,   Chuukese, Marshallese,
Tagalog, and Spanish.[4]   Hawai‘i public school educators have
been struggling with inadequate support and the impossible
challenge of asking their students to be prepared for high-stakes
testing. This issue requires the attention of policy makers.

OF OUR STUDENTS

Federal law requires programs that educate children with limited
English proficiency be 1) based on a sound educational theory;
2) adequately supported, with adequate and effective staff and
resources so that the program has a realistic chance of success; and
3) periodically evaluated and, if necessary, revised.[5]  In that vein,
recent community discussions around multilingualism could help
provide a way to strengthen the educational methods used with
English Language Learners. This work is based on the premise
that there is strength in the diverse multicultural and multilingual
students we serve in Hawai‘i, inasmuch as students who are English
Language Learners are potentially multilingual learners who may
have first languages other than or in addition to English, capacities
which should be used as resources for their educational success.
This approach effectively seeks to fulfill the mandates of federal
law by “providing program guidance to promote academic
achievement, English language development, and personal
growth for multilingual learners, which supports preparation for

college, career and community contribution,” building upon the
pedagogical “advantages of multilingualism for equitable and
quality education” by using the home language for content learning
while developing English language abilities.  This shift in education
policy to one better grounded in educational theory still requires
substantial additional funding so that it is adequately supported
with adequate and effective staff and resources for a realistic chance
of success.  This approach is already being explored by some of
Hawai‘i’s most transformational teachers and can be used to help
students explore their diverse backgrounds and different ways of
making meaning.[6]

It is also critical that this movement be connected to a more holistic
analysis of the current state of public education in Hawai‘i, and
coupled with a vision for the future based on cooperation, creativity,
trust-based responsibility, professionalism, and equity.

CLASS SIZE IS A
SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUE
Research conducted by the Institute of Education Sciences, within
the U.S. Department of Education, concludes that “class size
reduction is one of only four evidence-based reforms that have
been proven to increase student achievement.”[1] Experiments in
Tennessee, Wisconsin, and other states have demonstrated that
students in smaller classes have higher academic achievement,
receive better grades, and exhibit improved attendance. Moreover,
the students benefiting the most from smaller class sizes are from
poor and minority backgrounds, and they experience twice the
achievement gains of the average student when they are placed in
smaller classes. A study commissioned by the U.S. Department
of Education analyzed the achievement of students in 2,561
schools across the nation by their performance on the National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exams. After
controlling for student background, the only objective factor that
correlated with higher test scores was class size.[2]

Class Size Matters
All Grade Levels

for

Reducing class size drastically affects student learning positively,
especially with younger students in grades K-3, as shown by the wellknown Tennessee Project STAR (Student Teacher Achievement
Ratio) that included smaller class sizes.[3] In addition, it has also
been shown that reduced class size has particularly positive effects
on secondary students who are performing at lower levels. If
placed in larger class sizes, these lower achieving students continue
to perform at low levels and their achievement levels actually
decline in larger class settings. If these lower achieving students
are placed in larger classes, they tend to have off-task behaviors
that interfere with their learning. Teachers then spend the majority
of their time redirecting student behavior, instead of focusing on
important instruction. When these lower achieving secondary
students are placed in smaller classes, their academic progress and
achievement dramatically increase; and, if they remain in lower
class sizes, they continue to make great gains in their achievement
over an extended period of time.[4]

Class Size

and

Teaching

A smaller class size allows teachers to be able to use a variety of
pedagogical approaches more effectively as well as provide more
individualized instruction and deeper teacher feedback while
also improving students’ non-cognitive skills such as engagement

and attentiveness, contributing to higher graduation rates and
fewer dropping out of school.[5] Another point that should
not be overlooked is that smaller class sizes allow teachers to
develop stronger connections with students and more frequent
communication with their families. School connectedness is vital
for student success.[6]

Class Size

in

Our Local Context

The student-teacher ratios that are listed for each Hawai‘i
Department of Education school represent the total number
of students enrolled at a school divided by the total number of
teachers at a school.  It is important to note that the number of
teachers included in this ratio include non-classroom teacher
positions, such as registrars, librarians, curriculum coordinators,
curriculum coaches, and counselors.  In reality, class size should
refer to the actual number of students on a teacher’s roster for a
particular class, not a ratio or average.  For example, at a middle
school, the student-teacher ratio might state that it is 15-to-1, but
their actual class size at that particular middle school might be
from 30-35 students, or more, depending on the class. There are
also special education classes that should be smaller, due to the
needs of the special education students. Although there is a class
size limit for grades K-2 of 25 students in Hawai‘i, there is no
clear limit established for class sizes in grades 3-12. For example,
at Campbell High School, there are often classes in core academic
subjects of 40 or more students in class.  At the secondary level,
teachers currently instruct 6 classes in the state of Hawai‘i. This
means their teaching load, if each class consists of 30-35 students,
is a total of 180- 210 students (or more, if they have 40 students
in each class, such as the classes at Campbell High School).
Setting a limit of a class size of 20 students for grades K-3 and a
limit of 26 students for grades 4-12, as recommended by Hawai‘i
Board of Education Policy 2237, is an integral step necessary
to support student learning. It is needed to increase student
achievement, to improve attendance rates, contribute to student
connectedness, reduce off-task behaviors, and generally provide a
better learning environment for all students to be successful.

Our keiki deserve robust vocational education paths to rewarding
careers. Recent national public education ‘reform’ efforts under No
Child Left Behind, and more specifically, Hawai‘i’s involvement
in Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, have had the effect of
marginalizing and even gutting career and technical education
(CTE) programs in Hawai‘i as schools have redirected their limited
resources to fulfilling the educational reform agenda of raising
scores on standardized tests.[1]

Effects of Education Reform on
Career and Technical Education
There is a unified concern among Career and Technical Education
(CTE) constituents in Hawai‘i (teachers, industry experts, and
employers) about continued negative effects of federal legislation
because no area of CTE (agriculture; business, marketing, and
computer; family and consumer sciences; health occupations; or
technology, trade and industry education) was discussed at any
length in either No Child Left Behind (NCLB) or in the more
recently passed Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).[2] As a result
of the shift in emphasis to accountability measures that focus on
scores in high stakes standardized tests, secondary schools across the
state, mirroring the national trend, have utilized funding normally

set aside for CTE programs to improve students’ performance
in areas directly mentioned in the legislation, in order to meet
accountability requirements, devoting more instructional time
and curriculum attention to English Language Arts (ELA) and
mathematics.[3]
Because a majority of all current job openings, both locally and
nationally, are for positions that do not require college, the rhetoric
of education reform that emphasizes college while minimizing the
possibilities of other pathways does students a grave disservice.[4]
Families in our communities value the goal of a college education,
but in Hawai‘i, job projections by the Hawai‘i Department of Labor
show that overall, more than 72% of the state’s projected job openings
through 2022 require only a high school diploma or less. About 15%
of the future openings will require a Bachelor’s degree and another 3%
will need an Associate’s degree. The prerequisite for less than 2% of
all openings will be a Master’s degree, while another 2% will require
a Doctoral or Professional degree for employment.[5] While these
projections are based on a continuation of the existing economic model,
it is not clear that our definition of meaningful and productive work in
society should be limited to that which requires a college degree.  If the
end of poverty and social inequality are genuinely desired by those who
advocate education reform, then there should be strong support by all
parties for measures which unequivocally address social inequality, such
as more egalitarian tax measures and an increase in the minimum wage.

Impact

on

Economic Security

The current imbalance in educational direction is contributing to
deepening economic insecurity for our young people.   Not only
do current state and federal education policies overemphasize the
importance of the attainment of college degrees at the expense
of supporting students in a multitude of pathways, but they also
contribute to a social and economic situation that impoverishes
young people.  Students are strongly encouraged to attend college
at all costs so that schools can improve their college attendance rate
without regard to the wisdom of that imperative.  As a result, many
young people are becoming mired in debt, with “six out of ten
college graduates incurring an average of $30,000 in student loan
debt.”[6] Underemployment, a situation faced by far too many of
our young people, can be crippling to a young adult’s finances if
he or she cannot find full-time employment within six months of
graduating from college, when most loan repayment is scheduled to
begin. According to a national study, “more people than ever before
are earning college degrees, and as many as 39% of people under
25 are unemployed or underemployed,” and according to the Bureau
of Labor Statistics, nearly “8 percent of those under the age of 25
who have a four-year degree cannot find a job at all.”[7] In Hawai‘i,
that statistic is thought to be even higher.[8] “Career education in
too many of our secondary schools reflects an outdated model…

developing teachers who can work at the intersection of disciplines.
Attracting these instructors to apply for teaching positions in our
public schools has been a challenge, according to Michael Barros,
head of Hawai‘i’s Department of Education Career and Technical
Education programs.[10] Offering teachers salaries worthy of
their professional status will attract high-quality instructors to
CTE programs in the public school, and reducing the onerous and
irrational current teacher evaluation requirements will further assist
in attracting and retaining valuable CTE instructors. Moreover,
instructors moving straight into teaching, without training or
experience in working with adolescents and their parents, should
be provided with mentoring, support, and appropriate, yet flexible,
professional development to help them develop their skills and gain
teacher certification.
Hawai‘i, like most states, is “working toward the goal of getting their
students ‘college-and career-ready,’” but CTE experts are concerned
that “what we mean by ‘career-ready’ is not always clear, and the
supply of quality career-technical education programs has not kept
pace with demand.”[11] It is currently impractical, especially with
such sharply limited funding for public education, that all high
schools establish and maintain expensive facilities and infrastructure
with technical equipment that will require modernization over time.
Community colleges in Hawai‘i, on the other hand, are poised
to become the center for partnerships in vocational training.[12]

VOCATIONAL
EDUCATION
[resulting in an] increasingly pronounced skills gap that plagues
American businesses as they struggle to find qualified workers and
dead ends for our students who rely on career preparation programs
as their ticket into the middle class.”[9] When we coerce all students
to follow a narrow pathway to a four-year college without regard
to student preference and personal vision, we unjustly put them in
competition for fewer jobs, force them to incur unreasonable and
insurmountable debt, and contribute to the creation of a shortage
in Hawai‘i’s workforce of individuals prepared for a majority of
socially and economically critical jobs.

Restoring Balance in
Educational System

the

Hawai‘i’s Career and Technical Education programs need to
be expanded to provide greater opportunity to prepare young
people to design their own futures. This will require attracting
and retaining qualified instructors in many vocational fields and

With solid introductory courses to various professions and strong
vocational counseling provided by high schools, our secondary
school system can and should serve as catalysts to post-secondary
vocational training both on-the-job and in community colleges and
trade schools. Students must have several options available to them
in order to explore creative expression, academic excellence, and
practical plans for their future. Vocational counseling efforts must
be improved to help students see the opportunities of vocational
pathways. According to a national study, “only 25 percent of polled
job seekers reported receiving career pathing in high school, and
41 percent said they wished they had received more guidance.”[13]
Adequate provision of skilled and knowledgeable high school
counselors is essential to support individualized student planning
of coursework. Because of the unique geographical challenges
among the public high schools in Hawai‘i, the variety of programs
available at each school should be decided upon by a collaborative
effort of the community and school officials, so that they effectively
meet individual student and community needs.

Our keiki deserve, at the very least, school facilities that have
adequate lighting, clean air, comfortable heating and cooling,
properly-insulated windows that open and close, roofs that do
not leak, classrooms large enough to move around in (for projects
and group work), cafeterias, library media centers, functioning
plumbing in bathrooms, computer labs, science labs, auditoriums
with chairs, and fresh paint.[1] There is a growing body of work
linking educational achievement and student performance to the
quality of learning environment in which students and teachers
spend the majority of their waking hours.[2] Learning spaces have
become a critical social justice issue, and many researchers and
advocates in Hawai‘i and across the country are concerned about
the disproportionate effect of unhealthy public school facility
conditions on students from racial or ethnic minority groups and
from families having lower socio-economic status.[3]

air-conditioned
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Investigations linking indoor air quality, lighting, ventilation, and
temperature to student learning have emerged over the past three
decades and have produced clear results: facilities not conducive to
human health make teachers and students sick - sick students and
teachers cannot perform as well as healthy ones.[4]   Specifically,
poor air quality, weak or overly intense fluorescent lighting, lack
of adequate ventilation, and extreme classroom temperatures in
Hawai‘i, as in classrooms in the other dramatically underfunded
school districts around the country, have been associated
with increased student absenteeism, less productive learning
environments, student dissatisfaction, alienation, and poor
educational performance.  This scholarship supports the sensible
inference that physical environments (which include seating,
furnishings, spatial density, privacy, noise and acoustics, windowless
classrooms, vandalism, and playgrounds) have a dramatic effect on
students’ engagement, attainment, attendance, and well-being.[5]
Some of the most important insights about the connections
between place, space and learning include:
Temperature, heating, and air quality are the most important
individual elements for student achievement.[6]
Chronic noise exposure impairs cognitive functioning, with
a number of studies finding noise-related reading problems,
deficiencies in pre-reading skills, more general cognitive deficits,
and higher stress levels for students.[7]
Classroom lighting plays a particularly critical role in student
performance: appropriate lighting improves test scores, reduces offtask behavior, and plays a significant role in students’ achievement.
[8]

fundamentally urgent repairs for decades.[12] There has been
increasing media attention to the issue in recent years, as the
destructive effects of underfunding repair and upkeep of 256
schools generally built around 65 years ago have worsened.
[13]  The average age of a typical Hawai‘i public school is 59
years old, and “more than one-third of schools are over 75 years
old.”[14] Even with efforts to renovate, classrooms occupied by
young children all day have termite droppings, mold, peeling paint,
and rusty structures. Neglecting needed structural improvements to
our school facilities puts our children in danger and represents an
evasion of the most basic social responsibility to future generations.
It was a miracle that the collapse of Farrington High School’s gym
in 2012 did not result in harm to students, and it is not unlikely
that such events will reoccur without attention to this issue.[15]
With school buildings that are aging rapidly and in distressingly
poor repair, the environmental issues facing the islands have an
intensified impact on our unprotected children.[16] Air quality
issues for students include vog and exposure to pollutants from
pesticides being sprayed on or near campuses.[17]  With poor
ventilation, these irritants and pollutants are often either trapped
inside the classroom or kept out by eliminating all airflow in
classrooms without air conditioning, creating a stiflingly hot and
toxic environment for the students. The manifestations of climate
change, including increasingly high temperatures for longer periods
of the year and dramatic climate events, leave our children the most
vulnerable.[18]  Adults seek out air-conditioned spaces for work
and leisure during increasingly hot days, yet we subject our children
to sweltering conditions that not only make learning far less likely
but also, more importantly, pose an imminent threat to the health
of students and teachers alike.[19]
It is in the public charter schools, however, that the children and

QUALITY FACILITIES

Hawai‘i ranks LAST in the nation in capital improvement
investment per student.[9]  This chronic failure to adequately invest
in public schools is not just a source of public embarrassment.
When students see that buildings are neglected and dilapidated,
research has shown that they question whether or not education
is valued by their community, and this has noticeable effect
on their level of motivation.[10] The Hawai‘i state legislature
annually allocates far less to capital improvement funding than is
even necessary to address the backlog of maintenance issues. In
the January 2016 Supplemental Budget request, the Hawai‘i State
Department of Education only requested a total of an additional
$80 million in funding for capital improvement projects, when the
total cost of addressing the actual backlog of maintenance issues
has been estimated at $3.8 billion.[11]
Teachers, students and administrators actually working in the
public schools across the state have been begging for basic and

teachers have the least physical support because they have not been
receiving funding for facilities despite the fact that they are public
and not private charter schools.  Although Hawai‘i law now allows
the Charter School Commission to request facilities funding as part
of its annual budget request to the director of finance, and it may
receive, expend, or allocate any funds provided by the facilities funding
request beginning with fiscal year 2014–15, the legislature has not
been providing funding for facilities costs.[20] There are multiple
public charter schools across the state that lack adequate building
space, who have to conduct class outdoors, on covered lanais, or in
makeshift structures.[21] Public charter schools are forced to spend
time and energy seeking funds for facilities from outside sources
instead of focusing on student learning. Some of these public charter
schools were established in remote, rural areas, and they exist because
the state has simply never constructed a public school to meet the
needs of the growing populations of the area.[22] The perpetuation
of these conditions is unconscionable – our keiki deserve better.

SUPPORTING SMALL
Nearly one in six schools in Hawai‘i is rural, and these small, rural
schools serve over 8,500 students. Our students in small and rural
schools require more focused attention and policy-making because
the students in these schools are generally more vulnerable with fewer
social and economic supports. Despite median household incomes
close to the national median, persistent rural adult unemployment
remains a concern in Hawai‘i.[1] Rural household mobility in
Hawai‘i is very high, at almost 15%, and national analysis reveals
that children of all racial-ethnic groups are more likely to live in
poverty if they live in a rural place than if they live in either an
urban or suburban place.[2] In rural areas of Hawai‘i, over 40% of
families with children from ages 0-5 are below the poverty line, and
over 75% of single mother families with children from ages 0-5
are below the poverty line.[3] This is a critical issue for education
policy in Hawai‘i because research suggests that experiencing poverty
before age 18 is particularly harmful and has implications for brain
development as well as educational, occupational, health, and family
consequences.[4] While developing policies to reduce poverty rates
is the more holistic approach, because it can reduce overall societal
costs and improve outcomes for individuals and families, we can
begin by buffering our children in rural areas from the most brutal
effects of this poverty and lack of stability in multiple ways.[5]

Basic Staffing
Policymakers first need to fund rural schools in ways that are at
least sufficient to support basic educational goals. Our keiki in
less populated rural areas deserve quality school opportunities,
and to strengthen the educational institutions in rural areas, every
school should be adequately staffed to provide a solid educational
foundation with counselors, librarians, and elective teachers. To do
this, we will need to increase the differentials for rural schools and
decrease financial incentives designed to reward increases in school
size, as a wide body of research shows the small schools generally
yield better learning outcomes.[6]  

Weighted Student Formula
In the past few years, with the support of federal funds, Hawai‘i
has embarked on a focused campaign to improve education for its
most disadvantaged students. This includes the establishment of
Zones of School Improvement and the creation of the Weighted
Student Formula (WSF) under the Reinventing Education Act of
2004. WSF was intended to make funding for public education
more equitable, transparent, and decentralized. However, the
academic opportunities available to children in rural and small
schools has been dramatically limited by the unintended effects
of this funding mechanism. A recent report commissioned by the
Hawai‘i Department of Education and completed by the American
Institutes of Research (AIR) reveals that “small or isolated schools

do not have adequate funding under the WSF and that WSF does
not account adequately for diseconomies of scale associated with
small schools or for additional costs due to geographic isolation.”[7]
Lack of funding is a major challenge, especially for small schools that
“need to support essential personnel,” and small schools and those
in geographically remote locations were “especially lacking sufficient
funding to cover much more than a minimally operating program.”[8]
Other factors that have cost implications for operating schools need
to be taken into account, such as the inability of “necessarily small”
schools to take advantage of the economies of scale associated with
operating larger schools. More isolated communities lack wider and
deeper alternative funding sources. Lack of opportunity is more
pronounced in rural areas, due to distance from services, and rural
communities and families in poverty have less access to technology.
The American Institutes for Research suggest that “extra support”
be provided for schools that are small or isolated.[9] This requires
a reconsideration of the weighting factors that make up the WSF
so that they more “accurately account for the differential costs of
providing an equal opportunity for all students to achieve, regardless
of their individual needs or circumstances (such as geographic
location).”[10]

AND RURAL SCHOOLS
poverty stricken areas.[14] In Windward Oahu, 98% of schools have
at least one school librarian, while fewer than 30% of schools on
the Big Island, the county with the highest poverty rate in the state,
have a school librarian (and those are mostly in the urban areas).
[15] This type of deep disparity indicates that the implementation
of Weighted Student Formula has not resulted in educational
equity.   Compounding the issue of unfunded core positions, like
certified librarians, counselors and elective teachers, is the absence of
appropriate and useful professional development opportunities for
teachers in rural schools aligned with teachers’ professional needs.
There is a mismatch between the perceived usefulness of professional
development and the content of professional development that
teachers in rural schools are offered. In addition, very few rural
schools offer incentives to pursue professional development, such as
stipends or re-certification credit.
Fairness, grounded in a strong sense of what is pono, requires that
we provide, at the very least, equality of learning opportunities for
our children. Hawai‘i is first in the nation in terms of the percent
of students of color in rural schools.[16] NAEP performance in
Hawai‘i’s rural areas for 2013-2014 is lower than in nearly all other
states, with the absolute lowest score in fourth grade reading.[17]
Hawai‘i ranks in the lowest overall quartile, with the lowest rural
NAEP scores, on all four NAEP

Teacher Staffing
There are a number of issues connected to teacher staffing in
rural schools. Rural schools in Hawai‘i serve children with high
needs who require additional resources, special programs, and
expert teachers to be successful learners. Class size in Hawai‘i’s
rural public schools is above average for rural schools nationally.
[11] There are “geographic differences in resource prices,
especially with respect to staff,” so that not all rural schools
are able to attract and retain qualified staff.[12] Rural schools
in Hawai‘i are generally “hard-to-staff ” with highly qualified
teachers, tend to have high rates of teacher turnover and out-offield teaching assignments, and frequently use substitutes to fill
vacancies or assign out-of-field teachers, thereby failing to place a
qualified teacher in each classroom. While there is currently a bonus
for teaching at hard-to-staff schools, the authors of the AIR report
question whether it “is large enough to fully adjust for this cost
factor.”[13]
Using the Weighted Student Formula mechanism, small rural schools
are less likely to have counselors, librarians, and a wide choice of
electives. Research has established that certified school librarians
have a positive effect of literacy and achievement, particularly for

Student
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indicators, both 4th and 8th grade in both reading and
math.[18] Many of these challenges of providing equal educational
opportunities in rural and small schools in Hawai‘i can be addressed
if our first principle is that all of our keiki deserve the very best
education we can offer them.   This principle will require that
policymakers return to the mechanisms used to allocate resources
and not only find additional funding for all public schools, but also
use existing resources to more equitably support our small, rural
schools, which could have a profound effect on stabilizing remote
communities and contribute to a more sustainable Hawai‘i.

RETENTION AND
RECRUITMENT
Good education starts with good teachers, and our keiki in Hawai‘i
deserve the best. However, difficulties in the retention of existing
qualified teachers and recruitment of the next generation of qualified
teachers has reached crisis proportions, as the number of teachers
leaving their classrooms has been rising dramatically over the past five
years. The number of annual vacancies presents a serious problem
– every year at least 10% of all teachers leave Hawai‘i schools. This
number is one of the highest in the country (the national average is
6.8%), and these high teacher attrition rates come at a high price.[1]
Richard Ingersoll, a University of Pennsylvania professor whose work
centers on teacher retention, estimated that filling all the vacancies
could have cost Hawai‘i up to $13 million in 2008. This means that

teacher turnover costs from 2008 to 2014 could have amounted to
almost $70 million.[2]  

Teacher Shortage Crisis:
Impact on Students
Unfortunately, the real cost of teacher attrition is paid not by the state
but our students.[3] So many educators leave the classroom every year
that teacher preparation programs in the state of Hawai‘i cannot keep
up with the demand for new teachers.[4] This forces the state to recruit

teachers from the mainland (more than half of new teachers who have
completed a Teacher Education Program have obtained their degrees
from out-of-state institutions) and alternative teaching pipelines, such
as Teach for America (TFA), who are less likely to stay in the classroom.
[5] Every year, hundreds of vacancies are filled with emergency hires and
substitute teachers who often lack the appropriate training to facilitate
student success in the classroom.[6] For the 2015-2016 school year,
there were 1,210 open positions statewide for teachers. Of those 1210,
584 were hired under the designation of “emergency hire” (a teacher
that has not yet complete a State Approved Teacher Education Program
(SATEP)[7]: this includes all entering Teach for America teachers (98
in 2013-2014), which is projected to decline as TFA, too, has seen a
large drop in enrollment over the past two years.[8]

10 years of experience earn merely 9% more than teachers with no
experience whatsoever (in comparison, nationwide, teachers with 10
years of classroom experience on average enjoy 28% higher pay than
beginning teachers).[19] This appalling lack of upward mobility
continues to erode the appeal of the teaching profession and forces
many veteran teachers to look for jobs elsewhere. Because the Hawai‘i
Department of Education only considers a maximum of six years of
teaching experience from non-DOE teachers (i.e. charter, private, and
out-of-state) for salary placement purposes, many experienced teachers
would face major pay cuts in order to teach in Hawai‘i’s public schools.
This policy, coupled with extraordinarily low mid-career teacher salaries
and the high cost of living in Hawai‘i, effectively prevents schools from
keeping and recruiting experienced teachers.[20]

The students who suffer the most attend schools that already have a
hard time filling their open positions because their schools are remote,
rural, or struggling with poverty, crime, alienation and disaffection.[9]
Beginning and inexperienced teachers are those most likely to leave,
creating a perpetual “revolving door” that has a profoundly negative
effect on student learning and school community building.[10] Of the
teachers who leave the DOE each year, 60% resign (30% retire and 10%
are terminated).[11] “What we have is a retention crisis,” says National
Commission on Teaching and America’s Future commission President
Tom Carroll. The greatest problem is retaining teachers because of
high levels of attrition. Over 40 percent of new teachers leave the
profession within the first five years.[12] Pouring more teachers into the
system will not solve the retention problem. “As fast as [districts] are
moving teachers into schools, they’re leaving,” Carroll says.[13] When
almost 70% of new teachers hired each year have no previous teaching
experience, and research shows that teachers only become fully effective
after four or five years of classroom experience, the implications of our
inability to retain qualified teachers for students, student learning and
school community-building become clear.[14]

Beyond Pay

Sources of the Teacher
Retention Problem
The most glaring source of the teacher retention problem is pay. Those
entering the teaching profession suffer from a “teacher pay penalty”
nationally – similar college-educated workers in other professions outearn their teacher counterparts significantly. On average, teachers earn
13% less than they would in a different vocation.[15] The high cost of
living in Hawai‘i creates an even more challenging economic situation
for teachers.[16] With highest food, gas, and rent prices in the country,
teachers’ salaries are often literally unsustainable for young teachers, who
often need to pay off their student loans as well.[17] Almost 50% of
college students in Hawai‘i graduate with an average debt of $25,000,
and about 50% of new teachers hired each year are between 21 and 30
years old, so that far too many young HIDOE teachers suffer from such
heavy college debt burden that they have to get second jobs.[18]
Hawai‘i’s teachers are not only poorly compensated when they start –
their future outlook is also quite bleak. In Hawai‘i, teachers who stay
in the classroom see very little pay growth over time. Teachers with

Poor working conditions, going beyond dangerously overheated
classrooms and dilapidated facilities to include deprofessionalization
and loss of teacher autonomy and voice, are accelerating this attrition
rate. In a recent interview on NPR, Bill McDiarmid, Dean of the
University of North Carolina School of Education, points to the
erosion of teaching’s image as a stable career. “There’s a growing
sense…that K-12 teachers simply have less control over their
professional lives in an increasingly bitter, politicized environment….
The list of potential headaches for new teachers is long, starting
with the ongoing, ideological fisticuffs over the Common Core State
Standards, high-stakes testing and efforts to link test results to teacher
evaluations.”[21] A November 2014 National Education Association
survey reported that nearly 50 percent of all teachers are considering
leaving due to standardized testing.[22] Teaching has been dramatically
deprofessionalized, with teachers too often scapegoated by politicians,
policymakers, foundations and the media.[23] This is due largely to
the radical change in the  education landscape in recent years, with No
Child Left Behind as just one “particularly brutal manifestation of the
anti-teacher, anti-education mindset.”[24]

Beginning to Grapple
with the Problem
While the policy makers in Hawai‘i will need to muster strong
support for public education to address these issues, there are clear
strategies to create maximal positive impact. The first set of strategies
should immediately create learning environments in which adults are
compensated properly for their work, where “teachers are not blamed
for every manifestation of social problems, [and] where meaningless
tests given for the sake of “accountability” do not dominate the school
year.”[25] The second set of strategies will require foresight and
commitment to social justice in public education, with policies designed
to increase the attractiveness and appeal of the teaching profession for
talented young people from our own communities with college debt
forgiveness programs, better salary schedules that reward commitment
to the profession, opportunities for professional advancement, and
marked improvements to the teaching environment.

ENDING
HIGH-STAKES
TESTING

Since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was enacted in 2001,
Hawai‘i schools have gradually been forced to shift their focus
from teaching to testing. Although it may not have been the
intention, teachers have spent more and more class time preparing
their students for tests, and much less time engaging in rich and
meaningful instruction that does not pertain directly to the narrow
goal of achieving a desired test score.[1] The precise impact of
standardized testing has no doubt differed from school to school,
grade-level to grade-level, classroom to classroom. Such variation
is based on many factors, including school demographics and the
relative ability of faculties and administrative teams to withstand or
curb the negative impact of corrosive assessment practices. Despite
such variation, there now exists a clear consensus among educators
in Hawai‘i and across the U.S. that the overall effect of testing on
public schools and public school culture has been detrimental if
not devastating.

Negative Impact of the Common
Core State Standards
Many educators were initially enthusiastic about the now famous
Common Core State Standards (CCSS), as the new standards
seemed to grant educational consistency from state to state and
were reportedly more “rigorous” than previous state standards
documents. Enthusiasm quickly waned, however, as it became
apparent that, in the words of one recent commentator, CCSS had
come “shrink-wrapped” [2] with a pair of highly complicated and
expensive testing systems (the Smarter Balanced Assessment and the
PARCC Assessment) from which states were to choose. It appeared
that schools would be devoting even more time to standardized
testing than before, when states were free to develop their own tests.

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Race to the Top, Teacher
Evaluations, and “Teaching
to the Test”
The final turn of the screw took place in 2012 when Hawai‘i
received the $75 million Race to the Top (RTTT) grant. To
qualify for the grant, states had to agree to evaluate teachers based
on their performance. Similar to evaluation systems in other RTTT
states, the Educator Effectiveness System (EES) was developed in
order to satisfy this requirement. Teachers’ ratings would reflect
their students’ scores on the new tests, and these ratings would
determine pay raises as well as job continuance, despite considerable
research showing that teachers’ impact on student performance on
standardized tests is minimal.
Indeed, research has placed heavy doubt on the so-called “valueadded method,” or VAM, used in Hawai‘i to calculate teacher
effectiveness: “[T]he tests used for calculating VAM are not
particularly able to detect differences in the content or quality of
classroom instruction.”[3] Furthermore, the American Statistical
Association has established that the VAM formulas fail to
determine effectiveness “with sufficient reliability and validity.”[4]
The same teacher can receive wildly fluctuating results from year
to year. VAM scores are currently being used as part of EES to
evaluate teachers who do not even teach, and have never taught, the
students currently being assessed.

Damage

to

Public Education

The impact of the adoption of this faulty evaluation process by
the Hawai‘i DOE has been a widespread drop in teacher morale,
as teachers recognize that they are not being evaluated in a way
that is fair or reliable. The other outcome, of course, has been an
even more narrow and rigid focus on testing in Hawai‘i public
schools. The adoption of Educator Effectiveness System, which
links student test scores to teacher evaluation through the now
widely delegitimated “value-added method” (VAM), have virtually
guaranteed that many teachers, in order to maintain their rating
as “effective” (as opposed to “marginal” or “unsatisfactory”),
and even survive as teachers, feel that they must compromise their
professional integrity and decision-making by “teaching to the
test.”

Moment

of

Opportunity

Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the NCLB
replacement signed into law in December of 2015, states will
be required to maintain standardized testing but will be granted
considerable leeway regarding what the tests will look like, how
they will be implemented, and the uses to which data collected
from them will be put. While there is varying opinion as to the

relative merits of ESSA, we find ourselves at an exciting turning
point if for no other reason than the shift of decision-making
power with regard to testing from the federal back to the state
level. ESSA allows a state to adopt other types of assessment
beyond standardized tests, and teachers know that more authentic
assessments are more useful in informing instruction. We now have
the dual task of reversing the damage done by years of toxic testing
and rebuilding an educational culture based on what teachers know
through experience and what educational research confirms will
lead to the highest degrees of success for our students. We believe
that the following six steps must be taken:
1.     Minimize the amount of time devoted to standardized tests.
This will involve re-examining our current commitment to use
of the Smarter Balanced Assessment, which is expensive, timeconsuming, and of doubtful quality.[5]
2.      Seriously question the many uses to which data from the
Smarter Balanced Assessment is currently being put, including
Strive HI, which the Department of Education touts as “a
diagnostic tool to understand a school’s performance and progress

and differentiate schools based on their individual needs for reward,
support and intervention,”[6] but which unfairly ranks schools
from best to worst - a ranking that is based heavily on the highly
questionable data from the Smarter Balanced tests.
3.      Remove the barriers that are currently preventing teachers
from making the best decisions for their students. This entails
not only a thorough reexamination of the standardized testing
currently in place, but also a rethinking of the tremendously timeconsuming teacher evaluation system currently in place – a “topdown” system that teachers have almost unanimously decried as
wasteful, misguided, and professionally insulting.
4.     Grant teachers the critical autonomy and professional dignity,
both to work collaboratively to devise the formative assessment
methods and practices best suited to their particular students,
and to determine the fittest methods for evaluating their own
professional performance.
5.     Support teachers with the funds and resources they need to
reestablish an educational culture that consists of a well-rounded
curriculum and an approach to assessment that, rather than
ranking, promoting, and penalizing teachers and schools according
to narrow and mismeasured parameters, serves the goals to which
sound assessment has always been put – namely, understanding
what students have and haven’t learned from instruction and
adjusting that instruction accordingly.
6.     Support the rights of parents in determining how their
children spend the school day. Parents must be allowed to opt-out
or refuse standardized testing and demand their children receive an
education that is focused on real learning and that truly prepares
them for a better future. Furthermore, the Board and Department
of Education must inform parents of their rights to refuse
standardized testing without fear of penalty to or retaliation
against students, parents, teachers, and schools.

Parents

must

be

allowed
refuse

or
opt-out
and
testing
standardized
children
their
demand
at is
receive an education th
and
focused on real learning
them
that truly prepares
for a better future.

to

Genuine School Reform
As educational historian and critic Diane Ravitch has
written, “Genuine school reform must be built on hope, not
fear; on encouragement, not threats . . . on belief in the
dignity of the human person, not a slavish devotion to data;
on support and mutual respect, not a regime of punishment
and blame.”[7] Hawai‘i public schools have too long
languished in a system that has generated fear, employed
threats, and assigned blame to teachers, seriously affecting
the decisions of teachers and principals and casting a gloom
that has become pervasive in schools, ultimately affecting
our students and their families. It is now time for us to
reverse the damage done through “slavish devotion” to bad
data coming from mediocre tests. This will only happen
when teachers are granted the support, respect, and dignity
they need to determine how and in what measure their
students are to be tested.

The first five years in a child’s life are essential to lay a foundation
for future learning. Children who have access to quality Early
Childhood Education (ECE) meaningfully enhance their social,
academic, and cognitive skill set.[1] Students who have access to
quality preschool are given a chance to hone those skills at the
most critical time, a process which supports their development
and learning in later elementary years. Longitudinal studies have
shown that high-quality programs not only improve academics,

Socio-Economic Impact of
Early Childhood Education
International research has demonstrated the “well-designed (Early
Childhood Care and Education) ECCE policies present policy
makers with an opportunity to increase economic growth and at
the same time reduce inequality” and that public investment in

EARLY CHILDHOOD
but also improve long-term personal outcomes for children and
reduce social costs from crime and welfare.[2] Students who have
had access to quality pre-kindergarten early childhood education
demonstrate improved school performance, better mastery of
language and math, longer attention spans, reduced special
education placement, and lower school dropout rates.[3]  Socially
and emotionally, students are advantaged by having improved
interactions with peers, decreased behavioral concerns, and easier
adjustments to the high demands of later elementary school.[4]       
                   

ECCE is an important component of a larger economic strategy
that “produces more balanced and, therefore, more sustainable
growth.”[5] Other studies have shown that state investment in
quality Pre-K programs provides substantial economic benefit by
contributing to the development of a better-educated workforce
and higher tax base.[6] Additionally, a report entitled “Economics
of Early Childhood Investments” published in 2014 by the
White House reveals that such investment decreases long-term
social and economic costs of prisons, welfare, and other social
programs. Early childhood education, by improving cognitive and
socio-emotional development, can lower involvement with the
criminal justice system. Lower crime translates into benefits to

society from increased safety and security as well as lower costs
to the criminal justice system and incarceration. Early childhood
interventions can also reduce the need for remedial education.
This research shows that benefits in children’s development may
also reduce the need for special education placements and remedial
education, thereby lowering public school expenditures.[7]
Research by the bipartisan National Council for State Legislatures
has additionally found continuing positive long-term social and
economic effects of high-quality early childhood care and education
on low-income 3- and 4-year-olds.   Overall, the study recently
documented a “return to society of more than $17 for every dollar
invested in the early care and education program, primarily because
of the large continuing effect on the reduction of male crime.”[8]
These figures show a dramatic increase in long-term returns and are
supported by additional findings that a much higher percentage of
the group who received high-quality early education than the nonprogram group were employed at age 40 (76% vs. 62%), that more
of the group who received high-quality early education graduated
from high school than the non-program group, and that the group
who received high-quality early education had significantly fewer
arrests than the non-program group (36% vs. 55% were arrested
five times or more).[9]

Public Policy
This scholarship has begun to inform education policy at
multiple levels, and its implications have not escaped the Obama
administration: “In states that make it a priority to educate our
youngest children…studies show students grow up more likely
to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a
job, [and] form more stable families of their own.”[10] Currently,
the Hawai‘i pre-kindergarten pilot program, funded in Hawai‘i
through a federal grant, has a very limited reach, expanding to only
twenty sites in the state’s lowest performing and highest poverty
elementary schools. Act 109 of 2015 established the Executive
Office on Early Learning Public Pre-Kindergarten Program to
be administered by the Executive Office on Early Learning and

Universal Public Preschools
Education policies in Hawai‘i should reflect a comprehensive
approach to providing equitable access to high-quality early
learning, with a particular focus on children living in poverty,
multilingual children, children of color, and children with
disabilities. It is critical that these programs be accessible to all
families, particularly those in which children are the most vulnerable
and have the least access to social services and social support.
Access to early learning remains out of reach for many families.
[13] Private programs outside of Hawai‘i’s K-12 public education
have the greatest difficulty in meeting the criteria of consistently
good quality, equitable compensation, and affordable access.[14]
Currently, most early childhood care and education services in
Hawai‘i operate in a very price-sensitive market financed primarily
by fees from families and supplemented by private contributions, a
system which is inherently unstable, uncertain, and not subject to
adequate public oversight.[15]
A public program for early childhood education that is connected
to the existing K-12 public education structure in Hawai‘i, with a
relatively stable if inadequate funding base, can provide the critical
social and institutional stability necessary for continuity and real
social and economic gains over time if properly financed. As the
experiences of other states demonstrate, a universal early childhood
program increases the benefits for the entire system of public
education, as all students arrive at kindergarten better prepared to
learn, and early elementary teachers can more easily support their
students to meet higher expectations. Connecting early learning to
the existing K-12 public education not only makes possible stronger
alignment of early childhood education with early elementary
programming but also creates a shared structure for teacher
professional development and enhanced learning environments.
[16] Continuity and stability in this kind of initiative are critical,
as the full benefits of strong early childhood programs, those with
small class sizes, well-crafted learning environments, and extensive
family engagement take years to become fully visible.

EDUCATION MATTERS
provided through Department of Education public schools and
public charter schools.[11] The next necessary step will be to
appropriate additional funds for the Executive Office on Early
Learning Public Pre-Kindergarten Program and mandate universal
preschool for all eligible children by the 2020-2021 school year.
We believe that preschool should serve children in the year prior
to the year of kindergarten eligibility, with priority extended to
underserved or at-risk children, extending to all children no
later than 2020-2021.   Schools must hire qualified, properly
compensated teachers, have appropriate class sizes, and have access
to resources necessary for young children.[12]

Students

who

have

had

access

to

early
pre-kindergarten
te
tra
ons
dem
education
childhood
performance,
school
improved
ge and math,
better mastery of langua
reduced
spans,
attention
longer
cement, and
special education pla
rates.
lower school dropout

quality

Public school teachers in Hawai‘i have been under attack for the past
fifteen years, as policy makers, community leaders and politicians at all
levels have blamed teachers and their union for our state’s low standing
on national and international tests, and for the social and political ills
that result from the failure to educate citizens. Under the new Hawai‘i
Educator Effectiveness System, teacher ratings based in part on student
standardized test scores (shown to be an inaccurate and misleading
indicator of teacher effectiveness[1]), and a new top-down approach
to school administration[2] have demoralized teachers and undermined
schools as sites of collaborative learning and teaching. These new policies
are the result of our state leadership’s response to No Child Left Behind,
which have resulted in years of narrowed curricula, teaching to the test
and schools increasingly emptied of the joy of learning. Teachers have
been watching with a great deal of distress and frustration as the sort
of engaging and relevant learning that attracted them to the profession
is increasingly eliminated from the public school experience.[3] Teacher
job satisfaction in Hawai‘i, as across the country, has continued to drop
precipitously over the course of the 21st century.[4] This dissatisfaction
has emerged in large part from the deprofessionalization of teaching in
public schools.

Teacher Agency
The construction of teacher identity, how teachers understand themselves,
is dependent upon their power and agency over their working conditions
and their capacity, within positive learning environments, to contribute
to student learning and engagement.[5] There has been no recent ‘golden
age’ of public school teacher autonomy or empowerment in Hawai‘i, but
there is strong evidence that the landscape has shifted dramatically in the
past twenty years. In the 1980s, scholars of public education were already
arguing that “the prevalent use of textbook and teachers’ guide packages”
was one of the “greatest factors responsible for the current ills affecting
teaching,” with  “administrators…too frequently insisting on the slavish
use of these prefabricated materials, which reflects a deprofessionalized
image of teaching.”[6] Yet as recently as the 1990s, teachers studied in
all content areas and types of schools reported relatively high degrees
of personal control over both content and pedagogy, connecting a sense
of being efficacious in the classroom with satisfaction about their jobs.
[7] Prior to passage of No Child Left Behind, most teachers in public
schools said they had considerable influence over classroom decisions,

RESPECT, SUPPORT,

with more than half indicating they had considerable control over selecting
textbooks and other instructional materials and the content, topics, and
skills to be taught, and more than three-quarters indicating they were
firmly in control of selecting teaching techniques, evaluating and grading
students and determining the amount of homework to be assigned.[8]
The results of multiple studies indicated a significant relationship among
curriculum control policies and effects on teachers’ perceptions of their
own professional discretion and satisfaction.[9]

Effects

of

Education Deform

After the passage of No Child Left Behind, key popular educational ‘reform’
policies in Hawai‘i and across the country moved teaching away from
professionalism. These reforms included policies that evaluated teachers
based on students’ annual standardized test score gains (using the higly
questionable ‘value-added method’), fast-track teacher preparation and
licensure; and scripted, narrowed curricula. All three educational ‘reforms’
have found by scholars to lower the professional status of teaching. Valueadded policies are ‘de-professionalizing’ in that they pressure teachers to
mechanically teach to tests while systematically devaluing the broader yet
essential elements of teaching. Additionally, fast-track teacher preparation

differ across teaching level (elementary, middle, high school).[15] The
growing economic- and management-oriented perspective on education
leads to intensification of teachers’ work, implying deskilling and
deprofessionalization.[16] However, there appear to be multiple sources
for the intensification of teacher work, so that the intensification impact
is mediated and does not operate in a linear and automatic way, and that
it impacts different teachers in different ways. Thus, we argue for an
alternative form of professionalization through the acknowledgement
of teachers’ specific knowledge base as well as the need to develop it
(even if this implies more work). Teachers’ professional development
therefore needs to go hand in hand with efforts to “buffer” the threat of
intensification.[17]

Public Schools as Spaces
Student Empowerment

for

 In order for public schools to become spaces of authentic and empowering
learning, students must not only experience democratic practices, but also
feel that they have ownership in the educational process and the power to
effect change. Teachers play a critical role in building student confidence

PROFESSIONALISM
and licensure programs de-professionalize teaching by the “lack of focus
on pedagogical training, the small amount of time dedicated to preparing
teachers to teach, the assignment of inexperienced personnel to the most
challenging schools, and the itinerant nature of these teachers.”[10] Scripted
and narrowed curriculum moves teaching away from professionalization
by preventing teachers from using “their professional judgment to make
curricula decisions for student learning, with the consequent sacrifice of
higher-level learning, creativity, flexibility, and breadth of learning.”[11]
This process serves to disconnect teachers from curriculum design work:
the way teacher knowledge has been embedded in practice has been
replaced by a ‘disembedding’ of this knowledge, so that teacher planning
becomes disconnected from instructional practice in itself, a process that
happens ‘before [and outside of] action.’[12]
In studies that explored teacher identity and agency, “teacher agency has
clearly been constrained in the new reform context,” as teachers struggled
to “remain openly vulnerable with their students, and to create trusting
learning environments in what they described as a more managerial
profession with increased accountability pressures.”[13] Additional studies
examined the relationship between teacher autonomy and on-the-job
stress, work satisfaction, empowerment, and professionalism, and found
that “as curriculum autonomy decreased, on-the-job stress increased,” and
that “as general teacher autonomy increased so did empowerment and
professionalism.”[14] Also, as job satisfaction, perceived empowerment,
and professionalism increased, on-the-job stress decreased, and greater
job satisfaction was associated with a high degree of professionalism
and empowerment. These effects of professional autonomy did not

and creating an environment in which students can begin to exercise
democratic principles and empowerment. Empowered teachers are in the
best position to empower students because they can effect change not only
in their classrooms, but in the school. Empowerment has been defined as
a “process by which people gain control over their lives…a participation
with others to achieve goals, an effort to gain access to resources, and
some critical understanding of the sociopolitical environment.”[18]
True empowerment requires more than just autonomy and control. It
requires support from administration in the form of access to resources
such as time and money. Teachers need to be able to advocate, through
a collaborative process of developing academic and financial plans, for
shared knowledge of resources and support in decision-making from
school and state administration. Teachers need to lobby for the recognition
that shared power for the benefit of students actually helps to empower
administrators and communities. Some of the qualities of an empowering
school environment that need to be developed within Hawai‘i public
schools include: a) clarity of role and expectations, with less reliance on
command-and-control leadership tactics, b) political support and respect
for the actual work of teaching, c) socio-emotional peer support with a
sense of community, actively developed and sustained through thoughtful
policies, d) access to strategic resources such as space, materials, time, and
funds, and e) inspired state and school leadership who share the vision
of empowering students and value teacher input.[19] These factors can
lead teachers to feel that they have an honest impact on students and
student learning, and the ability to exert influence over their daily work
lives.  Teachers who do not work in this kind of environment are far less
likely to feel empowered, and are not likely to empower students.[20]

The factors that contribute to the current deplorable state of affairs
in public education in Hawai‘i are grounded in the original purposes
of the public education system and the ways in which it perpetuates
and hardens social divisions along racial, ethnic and class lines.
The historical context of cultural imperialism, illegal occupation,
and racial assimilation informed the original purposes of public
education in Hawai‘i, and can still be seen in the ways in which public
education suffers from underfunding and marginalization, especially in
comparison to the private schools in Hawai‘i.[1]

Historical Background:
Tale of Two Systems
The deep and dramatic divide between public and private education
in Hawai‘i originated in the relations of production shaped by sugar
and pineapple plantations from the late nineteenth century. American
sugar planters, most of whom were the sons of American Protestant
missionaries who had come to Hawai‘i to proselytize, benefitted both
from the Mahele and from a later 1872 non-judicial foreclosure
law, acquiring vast swathes of the most productive land by the late
nineteenth century.[2] Importing laborers largely from China, Japan,
Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, these white plantation owners used
race-based wage rates, language and cultural barriers, and differential
access to perquisites within the plantation system to divide the
plantation workers and successfully control them as sources of cheap
labor power.[3] Although Kamehameha II had established the first
public schools in Hawai‘i as part of his constitutional nation-state
building,[4] the American missionaries established the first private
school in Hawai‘i (Punahou) so that their children would not have
to go to school with Hawaiian children. [5] The illegal overthrow of
the Hawaiian kingdom by American forces in 1893 and subsequent
American occupation of Hawai‘i under pretext of annexation had
important implications for public education.[6]
Under American occupation, public schools became a more explicit
site of assimilation and cultural imperialism, especially as the children
of plantation workers came of school age and were required to attend
public school.[7] White plantation owners from Kohala and Pahala,
George C. Watt and James Campsie, reflected the dominant ideas of
the social elite: “Every penny we spend educating these kids beyond
the sixth grade is wasted,” complained Watt, to which Campsie
responded, “Public education beyond the fourth grade is not only a
waste, it is a menace. We spend to educate them and they will destroy
us.”[8] In 1910, when Governor Frear sought to minimally increase
the starvation budget of the public education system, the editorial
board of The Friend (a missionary publication) supported a tax to
raise money for schools and teachers’ salaries, arguing that “Hawai‘i
is richer than the rest of the American Union in annual per capita
production of wealth. Yet it spends a niggardly* $2.07 per capita on
its public schools annually, against a mainland average of $3.66.”[9]
The tax measure still failed. A 1920 federal survey of education in
Hawai‘i found, tellingly, that “Buildings, maintenance, equipment,

resources (e.g., libraries), salaries, number of teachers, and number of
schools, were deemed inadequate….[because] ‘the expense to which
the Territory has been placed on account of its schools is but a small
fraction of the costs which communities on the mainland have had to
meet.’”[10] Strikingly, the investigation team found that then, as now,
property tax rates were unusually low and that “the tax rates in the
islands fall most heavily on those…. who can least afford to pay.” [11]

* The original language of this quote has been retained with use of the word ‘niggardly’ to emphasize historical preconceptions of missionaries and plantation owners at the time.

A CRITICAL NEED
FOR FUNDING

A Segregated Education System?
Hawai‘i became ‘Americanized’ as a territory, in the first half of
the twentieth century, in part through the work of educators
who helped to create a two-tiered public school system (English
Standard and Common Schools).[12] The Common Schools were
institutionalized for plantation workers and English Standard
Schools were developed for white “middle level plantation
management and technicians, physicians, teachers, social workers,
shop keepers, skilled craftsmen, and members of the American
military.”[13] For most of the twentieth century, public schools
in Hawai‘i served the children of workers and lower middle
class, while the social and political elite sent their children into a
substantial and well-funded private school system.[14] However, it
is important to note that, despite the widening disparities between
the public and private systems of education in Hawai‘i, there were
strong agents for democratic and ‘progressive’ change in the public
school system in the first half of the twentieth century, including
Superintendent MacCaughey and Miles Cary, famed principal of
McKinley High School.[15] While such efforts did have positive
effects on public education, both MacCaughey and Cary were

unable to address fundamental underlying inequality evident
in widely disparate resources available for the public and private
education systems.
This existing social hierarchy in Hawai‘i, slightly modified by the
effects of the labor movement, statehood, the Democratic Revolution
and the Hawaiian Renaissance, continues to be reproduced through
a bifurcated educational system.[16] The reproduction of inequality
through the starvation of public education, and privileging of
private education by the political elite, was evident even prior to the
Democratic Revolution. As John Reineke points out in 1956, the
“reluctance of the industrial interests who controlled taxation and
government spending, to spend money on high schools, was a powerful
factor” in the strengthening of the private school system even at that
time.[17]

Lawmaking Reinforcing
the Status Quo
Evidence of the continuation and perpetuation of a racially segregated
education system is clearly written into the legislative record of
Hawai‘i, as elected representatives, all members of the social and

DISTRICT SPENDING PER PUPIL
$30,000

$26,661

$25,000

$25,061

$22,762

$22,600

$22,157
$18,361

$20,000
$15,000
$10,000
$5,000
$0

Washington,
D.C.

NewYork
City, NY

Boston, MA Pittsburgh,
PA

economic elite, most of whom send their own children to private school,
fail year after year to provide anything resembling adequate funding for
public education in Hawai‘i. Lawmakers in the twenty-first century have,
rather, dedicated their considerable powers to measures that make public
schools less democratic, less creative, and less joyful places of learning.
[18] The current underfunding of Hawai‘i’s public schools is part of a
larger historical pattern of almost criminal neglect. When the cost of
living is factored in, Hawai‘i is last in the nation in the percent of state
and local expenditures for public education per student.[19] Hawai‘i also
ranks last in the nation with regards to capital improvement money per
student per year, with the Hawai‘i state legislature allocating about $300
per pupil whereas the mainland averages $1,200 to $1,500.[20] Hawai‘i
also currently ranks last in the nation when it comes to teacher pay adjusted
for cost of living. The average teacher salary in Hawai‘i, adjusted for cost
of living, is $32,312. [21]

Comparing Hawai‘i Public
School Funding
Hawai‘i underfunds its public schools when compared to both school
districts on the mainland with similar costs of living and with private
schools in Hawai‘i. Hawai‘i spends $11,823 per pupil, which is 17th
in the nation when compared to other states.[22] However, using a
state-by-state comparison is not the most accurate measure of public
education funding. Better, more insightful comparison is possible through
comparison of Hawai‘i’s funding with other school districts of similar
size and demographics, rather than with other states. Hawai‘i is the only
statewide school district, and school districts on the continent with

Cincinnati,
OH

Detroit, MI

high costs of living are averaged with school districts with rural districts
with lower costs of living in statewide aggregate analysis. Illinois, which
has a similar cost per pupil as Hawai‘i, has 863 school districts, with one
expensive school district: Chicago.[23] When comparing school districts
of similar size, Hawai‘i is 227 on the list, even without adjusting for cost
of living. Comparisons of spending per pupil in America’s largest school
districts yield interesting results.[24]
Hawai‘i’s major private schools average $15,173 in per pupil spending.
When Catholic schools, which are subsidized by the Roman Catholic
Diocese, are removed from the aggregate, per pupil spending in Hawai‘i
private schools reaches nearly $19,173 dollars per student. [25] This
figure does not, however, include endowment funds that increase the actual
amount spent per pupil. As Punahou President Jim Scott revealed in 2014,
“The real cost of our education per student is $26,000. … The difference
is met through our endowment — now at $235 million — and fundraising $12 million or $15 million a year. Every tuition-paying parent is
being subsidized by fundraising and by the Punahou endowment.” [26]

What Is To Be Done?
While funding provides one lens useful in examining how social hierarchy
is reproduced by education in Hawai‘i, it is a critical and previously
inadequately examined area of analysis. And the possible remedies for the
inequities resulting from underfunding are limited only by the imagination
and political will, not of legislators but of the citizens of Hawai‘i. This is
the education of our children, and if we are not willing to hold ourselves
accountable, no one will.

ENDNOTES
INTRODUCTION – SCHOOLS OUR KEIKI DESERVE
[1] Jones, Denisha. “Another Casualty in the Fight to Save Public Education: An
Interview with Barbara Madeloni.” EmPower Magazine. EmPower, 13 June 2012.
Web. 14 Jan. 2016.
WHOLE CHILD EDUCATION
[1] “ARCH || State DOE Accountability || Superintendent’s Annual Report ||
2014.” ARCH || State DOE Accountability || Superintendent’s Annual Report
|| 2014. Web. 07 Jan. 2016.

Akelheilm, Karen. “Does Class Size Matter?” Science Direct. Elsevier Ltd, June
2002. Web. 16 Jan. 2016.
[3] Boyd-Zaharias, J., & Pate-Bain, H. 2000. “Early and new findings from
Tennessee’s Project STAR.” The CEIC Review, 9(2), 4.
[4] Blatchford, P., Bassett, P. & Brown, P. “Examining the effect of class size on
classroom engagement and teacher - pupil interaction: Differences in relation
to pupil prior attainment and primary vs. secondary schools,” Report of the
Department of Psychology and Human Development, University of London, 1
April 2011.

[4] “’Iolani School: Sullivan Center.” ‘Iolani School: Sullivan Center. Web. 07 Jan.
2016.

[5] Evertson, C. M., & Randolph, C. H. 1989. “Teaching Practices and Class
Size: A New Look at an Old Issue.” Peabody Journal of Education, 67(1), 85105.   Graue, E., Rauscher, E., & Sherfinski, M. (2008). Using Multiple Data
Sources to Understand the Synergy of Class Size Reduction & Classroom Practice
in Wisconsin. Paper to American Educational Research Association Annual
Meeting, New York. Dee, T., West, M. (2011) “The non-cognitive returns to class
size.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. 33-1:23-46. Boyd-Zaharias, J., &
Pate-Bain, H. 2000. “Early and new findings from Tennessee’s Project STAR.” The
CEIC Review, 9(2), 4.

[5] “ARCH || State DOE Accountability || Superintendent’s Annual Report ||
2014.” ARCH || State DOE Accountability || Superintendent’s Annual Report
|| 2014. Web. 07 Jan. 2016.

[6] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “School Connectedness: Strategies
for Increasing Protective Factors Among Youth.” Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services; 2009.

[6] “The Power of the Indigenous: Native Success in Education and in Life.”Pacific
Rim International Conference on Disability and Diversity. Web. 07 Jan. 2016.

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

[2] Azzam, Amy M. “Why Creativity Now? A Conversation with Sir Ken
Robinson.” Educational Leadership: Teaching for the 21st Century. ASCD. Web.
07 Jan. 2016.  Moke, Heather. “Motivating Students to Learn.” Policy Priorities:
Student Engagement. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Web. 07 Jan. 2016.
[3] “Junior School (K - 8).” Punahou School:. Punahou. Web. 07 Jan. 2016.

[7] Miller, John P. “Whole Teaching, Whole Schools, Whole Teachers.”Educational
Leadership:Engaging the Whole Child (online Only). ASCD, n.d. Web. 07 Jan.
2016.
[8] Hawai‘i. Department of Education. Hawai‘i State Senate. Supplemental Budget
Briefing FY 2016-17. Hawai‘i State Department of Education, 8 Jan. 2016. Web.
8 Jan. 2016.
[9] Department of Education, State of Hawai‘i.  (2014).  Superintendent’s annual
report, 2014.  Honolulu, HI:  Department of Education, State of Hawai‘i.
[10] Hawai‘i Health Data Warehouse, State of Hawai‘i.   (2015, November
5).  Hawai‘i School Health Survey: Youth Risk Behavior Survey Module, Report
Created: 5/30/14.
[11] Rajagopal, Kadjir. “Culturally Responsive Instruction.” Create Success! ASCD.
Web. 08 Jan. 2016.
SUPPORTING ALL OF OUR STUDENTS
[1] Hawai‘i State Senate. Supplemental Budget Briefing FY 2016-17. Hawai‘i State
Department of Education, 8 Jan. 2016. Web. 9 Jan. 2016.
[2] Ibid.
[3] “IDEA - Building The Legacy of IDEA 2004.” USDOE, Web. 09 Jan. 2016.
[4] “Hawai‘i DOE | English Language Learners (ELL).” Hawai‘i State Department
of Education. Web. 09 Jan. 2016.
[5] Brown, Emma. “Feds Push Schools to Observe Civil Rights of Children
Learning English As a Second Language.” Washington Post. 15 Jan. 2015. Web.
09 Jan. 2016.
[6] Studies of Heritage and Academic Languages and Literacies Program Part 1 of
3. Perf. Farrington SHALL Students. Olelo. Farrington High School, 9 Nov. 2009.
Web. 9 Jan. 2015.

[1] Daggett, Willard. “The Future of Career and Technical Education.” ERIC, Mar.
2003. Web. 17 Jan. 2016.
[2] “Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).” Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).
Ed.gov, 10 Dec. 2015. Web. 17 Jan. 2016.
[3] “The Goals of Education.” Economic Policy Institute. EPI.org, 4 Dec. 2006.
Web. 17 Jan. 2016.
[4] “Occupational Employment Projections to 2022.” Monthly Labor
Review(2013): 1-44. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bls.gov, Dec. 2013. Web. 17
Jan. 2016.
[5] “Hawai‘i Labor Market Dynamics.” Hawai‘i Workforce Infonet (2015): 14.
Research and Statistics Office Department of Labor & Industrial Relations, State
of Hawai‘i. Hiwi.org, Sept. 2015. Web. 17 Sept. 2016.
[6] NEA’s Degrees Not Debt: An Organizer’s Guide to Kick Student Debt (2014):
1-18. National Education Association. Neo.org, June 2014. Web. 17 Jan. 2016.
[7] The Shocking Truth About The Skills Gap (2015): 3. Career Builder.
Careerbuildercommunications.org, Dec. 2014. Web. 17 Jan. 2016.
[8] LaFrance, Adrienne. “More People Are Underemployed in Hawai‘i Than Are
Jobless.” Civil Beat News. Civilbeat.org, 26 Mar. 2014. Web. 17 Jan. 2016.
[9] Making Career Preparation Work for Students (2014): 2. Council of Chief
State School Officers. Ccsso.org, Nov. 2014. Web. 17 Jan. 2016.
[10] “Michael Barros: Hawai‘i’s Career and Technical Education Programs.”
Telephone interview. 19 Dec. 2015.
[11] Making Career Preparation Work for Students (2014): 1-28. Council of
Chief State School Officers. Ccsso.org, Nov. 2014. Web. 17 Jan. 2016.
[12] “Programs of Study.” University of Hawai‘i Community College. University
of Hawai‘i, 7 Jan. 2016. Web. 17 Jan. 2016.
[13] The Shocking Truth About The Skills Gap (2015): 6-7. Career Builder.
Careerbuildercommunications.org, Dec. 2014. Web. 17 Jan. 2016.

CLASS SIZE IS A SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUE
[1]”Class Size Reduction Research.” Class Size Matters RSS. Classizematters.org,
05 Nov. 2012. Web. 16 Jan. 2016.
[2] Haimson, Leonie. Is There a Threshold Effect in Reducing Class Size? (2009):
1-4. Class Size Matters. Classizematters.org, 9 Dec. 2009. Web. 16 Jan. 2016.

QUALITY FACILITIES
[1] Schneider, Mark. “Do School Facilities Affect Academic Outcomes?” National
Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities. National Institute of Building Sciences,
Nov. 2002. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.   Uline, Cynthia, and Megan Tschannen?Moran.
“The Walls Speak: The Interplay of Quality Facilities, School Climate, and Student

Achievement,” Journal of Educational Administration: Vol 46, No 1. Emerald
Insight, 1 Sept. 2008. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.
[2] Lyons, John. “Do School Facilities Really Impact A Child’s Education ?”
School Design and Planning Laboratory: University of Georgia. Web. 14 Jan.
2016. “Appendix B Additional Resources, Planning Guide for Maintaining School
Facilities.” National Center for Education Statistics. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.

[1] Johnson, Jerry, Daniel Showalter, and Robert Klein. “The Facts About Rural
Education in the 50 States.” Why Rural Matters 2013-14 (May 2014): 55. Rural.
edu. Rural School and Community Trust, May 2014. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.

[3] “Research Publications.” The Childrens Environmental Health Network.
Childrens Environmental Health Network, 18 Nov. 2015. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.

[4] Jensen, Eric. “How Poverty Affects Behavior and Academic Performance.”ASCD.
org. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, n.d. Web. 15 Jan.
2016.

[4] “Creating Healthy Indoor Air Quality in Schools.” EPA. Environmental
Protection Agency, Web. 14 Jan. 2016.

[5] Biddle, Bruce J. The Unacknowledged Disaster: Youth Poverty and Educational
Failure in America. Boston: Sense, 2014. Print.

[5] Lackney, J. A. “Assessing School Facilities for Learning/Assessing the Impact of
the Physical Environment on the Educational Process: Integrating Theoretical Issues
with Practical Concerns.” Diss. Mississippi State: Educational Design Institute, 17
Sept. 1999. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.

[6] Iatarola, Patrice, Amy Ellen Schwartz, Leanne Steifel, and Colin Chellman.
“Small Schools, Large Districts: Small-School Reform and New York City Students.”
TCRecord.com. Teachers College Record, 1 Dec. 2008. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.

[6] Earthman, Glen. Prioritization of 31 Criteria For School Building Adequacy.
Rep. Blacksburg: Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State U, 2004. Print.

[7] Levins, Jesse, Jay Chambers, Diane Epstein, Nick Mills, Mahala Archer, Antonia
Wong, and Kevin Lane. Evaluation of Hawai‘i’s Weighted Student Formula, p. 144.
Rep. American Institutes for Research, June 2013. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.

[7] Woolner, Pamela, and Elaine Hall. “Noise in Schools: A Holistic Approach
to the Issue.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI), 23 Aug. 2010. Web. 14
Jan. 2016.

[8] Ibid, 149.

[8] Mott, Michael, Daniel Robinson, Ashley Walden, Jodie Burnett, and Angela
Rutherford. “Illuminating the Effects of Dynamic Lighting on Student Learning.”
Sage Publishing Company, Sept. 2011. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.

[11] Johnson, Jerry, Daniel Showalter, and Robert Klein. “The Facts About Rural
Education in the 50 States.” Why Rural Matters 2013-14 (May 2014): 55. Rural.
edu. Rural School and Community Trust, May 2014. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.

[9] Coco, Kim. “Entering Another Cycle of Neglect for School Maintenance.”
Civilbeat.com. Civil Beat, 19 Jan. 2015. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.

[12] Levins, Jesse, Jay Chambers, Diane Epstein, Nick Mills, Mahala Archer, Antonia
Wong, and Kevin Lane. Evaluation of Hawai‘i’s Weighted Student Formula, p. 154.
Rep. American Institutes for Research, June 2013. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.

[10] Bowers, J. Howard, and Charles Burkett. “Relationship of Student Achievement
and Characteristics in Two Selected School Facility Environmental Settings.” ERIC,
Oct. 1987. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.
[11] Hawai‘i State Senate. Supplemental Budget Briefing FY 2016-17. Hawai‘i
State Department of Education, 8 Jan. 2016. Web. 9 Jan. 2016. Coco, Kim.
“Entering Another Cycle of Neglect for School Maintenance.” Civilbeat.com. Civil
Beat, 19 Jan. 2015. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.

[9] Ibid, 145.
[10] Ibid, 149.

[13] Ibid.
[14] School Library Impact Studies Project. School Library & Information
Technologies Graduate Program, 1 Dec. 2013. Web. 16 Jan. 2016.
[15] “Poverty Map.” Poverty USA: A CCRD Initiative. PovertyUSA.org, 1 Dec.
2015. Web. 16 Jan. 2016.

[12] Coco, Kim. “Entering Another Cycle of Neglect for School Maintenance Civil Beat News.” Civilbeat.com. Civil Beat, 19 Jan. 2015. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.

[16] Jimerson, Lorna. “Teachers and Teaching Conditions in Rural New
Mexico.”Rural.edu. Rural School & Community Trust, 1 June 2004. Web. 15 Jan.
2016.

[13] Bussewitz, Kathy. “With No ACs And Record High Temps, Hawai‘i Schools
Consider ‘Heat Days’” Huffingtonpost.com. Huffington Post, 12 Aug. 2015. Web.
15 Jan. 2016.

[17] Johnson, Jerry, Daniel Showalter, and Robert Klein. “The Facts About Rural
Education in the 50 States.” Why Rural Matters 2013-14 (May 2014): 1-94. Rural.
edu. Rural School and Community Trust, May 2014. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.

[14] Blair, Allyson. “DOE Asks for $534 Million for Schools Repairs, Heat
Abatement.” HNN.com. Hawai‘i News Now, 23 Oct. 2015. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.

[18] Ibid.

[15] Kerr, Keoki, and Ben Gutierrez. “No Injuries as Roof Collapses at Farrington
High.” HNN.com. Hawai‘i News Now, 24 Nov. 2012. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.

RETENTION AND RECRUITMENT

[16] Kubota, Lisa. “Sizzling Temperatures during Record-setting Summer.” HNN.
com. Hawai‘i News Now, Sept. 2015. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.
[17] Kerr, Keoki. “Coalition Pushes for Pesticide-Free Buffer Zones Around
Schools.” HNN.com. Hawai‘i News Now, 21 Jan. 2015. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.
[18] Blair, Allyson. “DOE Asks for $534 Million for Schools Repairs, Heat
Abatement.” HNN.com. Hawai‘i News Now, 23 Oct. 2015. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.
[19] Mendoza, Jim. “Oahu Teacher Sent to ER Due to Heat Exhaustion in
Classroom.” HNN.com. Hawai‘i News Now, 2 Sept. 2015. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.
“Ewa Beach Teacher Treated for Heat Exhaustion.” SA.com. Star Advertiser, 2 Sept.
2015. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.
[20] “Measuring Up: Hawai‘i.” Publiccharterschools.org. National Alliance for
Public Charter Schools, 1 Dec. 2015. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.
[21] Ahana, Elizabeth. “Cultivating Native Hawaiian Learning: Hawaiian-Focused
Charter Schools.” KSBE.edu. Kamehameha Schools: I Mua Newsroom, 10 Nov.
2015. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.
[22] Terrell, Jessica. “Disagreements Over Charter School Oversight Coming To A
Head.”Civilbeat.com. Civil Beat News, 29 Nov. 2015. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.
SUPPORTING SMALL AND RURAL SCHOOLS

[1] Haynes, Mariana. “On the Path to Equity: Improving the Effectiveness of
Beginning Teachers.” Alliance For Excellent Education On the Path to Equity
Improving the Effectiveness of Beginning Teachers Comments. All4ed.org, 14 July
2014. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Southern, Kyle. “Stopping the Revolving Door of Teacher Turnover.” SCORE.
State Collaborative on Reforming Education, 29 Mar. 2012. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.
[4] Kelleher, Jennifer Sinco. “Hawai‘i Schools Struggling to Keep New Teachers.”The
Maui News. Mauinews.com, 11 Aug. 2013. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.
[5] Kim, Amber, Ph.D. “The Truth about TFA: A Book Review of Learning
from Counternarratives in Teach for America by S. Matsui.” Teach for America.
Amberkkim.wordpress.com, 05 Oct. 2015. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.
[6] Employment Report School Year 2013-2014. Rep. Hawai‘i Department of
Education, 2015. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Rich, Motoko. “Fewer Top Graduates Want to Join Teach for America.” The
New York Times. The New York Times, 05 Feb. 2015. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.
[9] “Hawai‘i Schools Fill Teacher Shortage with Recruits from Mainland but
Struggle to Keep Them.” Fox News. Fox News Network, 10 Aug. 2013. Web. 18
Jan. 2016.
[10] Kain, John F., Steve Rivkin, and Eric Hanushek. “The Revolving
Door.”Education Next. Educationnect.org, 13 July 2006. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.

[11] “Table XIII.” Employment Report School Year 2013-2014. Rep. Hawai‘i
Department of Education, 2015. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.

[2] Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy. A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool: Presenting
the Evidence. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.

[12] Kopkowski, Cynthia. “Why They Leave.” National Education Association.
Nea.org, 5 Apr. 2008. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.

[3] Magnuson, Katherine A., Christopher Ruhm, and Jane Waldfogel. “The
Persistence of Preschool Effects: Do Subsequent Classroom Experiences Matter?”
Early Childhood Research Quarterly 22.1 (2007): 18-38. Web.

[13] Ibid.
[14] “Table VIII.” Employment Report School Year 2013-2014. Rep. Hawai‘i
Department of Education, 2015. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.
[15] Allegreto, Sylvia. “Teacher Pay Penalty.” Economic Policy Institute. Epi.org, 20
Nov. 2014. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.
[16] Murakami, Kery. “Living Hawai‘i: Why Is the Price of Paradise So High?”
Civil Beat News. Civilbeat.com, 04 Sept. 2013. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.
[17] Wong, Alia. “How Come So Many Teachers Bail on Hawai‘i’s Public Schools?”
Civil Beat News. Civilbeat.com, 04 Sept. 2013. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.
[18] “Student Debt and the Class of 2014.” Student Debt (2015): 1-35. Institute
for College Access and Success. Ticas.org, Oct. 2015. Web. 18 Jan. 2016. “Table
VI.” Employment Report School Year 2013-2014. Rep. Hawai‘i Department of
Education, 2015. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.
[19] Ibid.

[4] Barnett, W. Stephen, Ph.D. “Expanding Access to Quality Pre-K Is Sound
Public Policy.” NIEER. National Institute for Early Education Research. Web. 10
Jan. 2016. Fitzpatrick, Maria. “Starting School at Four: The Effect of Universal
Pre-Kindergarten on Children’s Academic Achievement.” The B.E. Journal of
Economic Analysis & Policy. Stanford University Press, 18 Nov. 2008. Web. 18 Jan.
2016. Weiland, Christina, and Hirokazu Yoshikawa. “Impacts of a Prekindergarten
Program on Children’s Mathematics, Language, Literacy, Executive Function, and
Emotional Skills.” Child Development. Wiley Library, Nov.-Dec. 2013. Web. 18
Jan. 2016.
[5] Barnett, W. Steven, and Milagros Nores. “Investing in Early Childhood
Education.” Early Childhood Education: A Global Perspective | Nieer.org. National
Institute for Early Education Research, Nov. 2012. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.
[6] Berger, Noah, and Peter Fisher. “A Well-Educated Workforce Is Key to State
Prosperity.” Economic Policy Institute. Epi.org, 22 Aug. 2013. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.

[20] “Table 2. Percentage of Public School Districts That Had Salary Schedules for
Teachers and among Those That Had Salary Schedules, the Average Yearly Teacher
Base Salary, by Various Levels of Degrees and Experience and State: 2007–08.”
School and Staffing Survey (SASS). National Center for Education Statistics, Web.
18 Jan. 2016.

[7] The Economics of Early Childhood Investments. Rep. White House, Dec.
2014. Web. 10 Jan. 2016.

[21] Westervelt, Eric. “Where Have All The Teachers Gone?” NPR. NPR, 4 Mar.
2015. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.

[9] Clothier, Steffanie, and Julie Poppe. “New Research: Early Education as
Economic Investment.” National Conference for State Legislatures. Ncsl.gov, Dec.
2005. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.

[22] Walker, Tim. “NEA Survey: Nearly Half Of Teachers Consider Leaving
Profession Due to Standardized Testing.” NEA Today. Nea.org, 02 Nov. 2014.
Web. 18 Jan. 2016.

[8] Clothier, Steffanie, and Julie Poppe. “New Research: Early Education as
Economic Investment.” National Conference for State Legislatures. Ncsl.gov, Dec.
2005. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.

[10] “Remarks by the President in the State of the Union Address.” The White
House. The White House. Web. 10 Jan. 2016.

[23] Kumashiro, Kevin K. Bad Teacher!: How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger
Picture. New York: Teachers College, Columbia U, 2012. Print.

[11] “Results of the 2015 Legislative Session Early Learning Legislation.”Executive
Office on Early Learning. Earlylearning.hawai‘i.gov, Oct. 2015. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.

[24] Newton, Steven. “Where Have All the Teachers Gone?” The Huffington Post.
TheHuffingtonPost.com, 29 Sept. 2015. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.

[12] Why Teacher Quality Matters and How We Can Improve It. Rep. National
Association for the Education of Young Children. Web. 10 Jan. 2016.

[25] Ibid.

[13] Mendoza, Jim. “Preschool Funding at Risk for Low-income Families.” Hawai‘i
News Now. Hnn.com, 13 Apr. 2015. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.

ENDING HIGH STAKES TESTING

[14] Wong, Alia. “Many Families Sacrifice to Put Kids in Private Schools.” Living
Hawai‘i. Civilbeat.com, 17 Mar. 2014. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.

[1] Walker, Tim. “NEA Survey: Nearly Half Of Teachers Consider Leaving
Profession Due to Standardized Testing - NEA Today.” NEA Today. NEA, 02 Nov.
2014. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.
[2] Hagopian, Jesse. “Arne Duncan. Testocracy Tsar. Educational Alchemist.
Corporate Lackey.” The Progressive, 01 Jan. 2016. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.
[3] Polikoff, M. S., and A. C. Porter. “Instructional Alignment as a Measure of
Teaching Quality.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 36.4 (2014): 399416. Web.
[4] Strauss, Valerie. “Statisticians Slam Popular Teacher Evaluation Method.”
Washington Post. The Washington Post, 13 Apr. 2014. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.
[5] Strauss, Valerie. “What the New Common Core Tests Are - and Aren’t.”
Washington Post. The Washington Post, 1 Jan. 2015. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.
Rasmussen, Steven. “The Smarter Balanced Common Core Mathematics Tests Are
Fatally Flawed and Should Not Be Used: An In-Depth Critique of the Smarter
Balanced
Tests for Mathematics.” SR Education Associates. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.
[6] “Strive HI System Index.” Hawai‘i State Department of Education. Web. 14
Jan. 2016.
[7] Ravitch, Diane. (2013). Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization
Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION MATTERS
[1] Reynolds, A., Temple, J., & Ou, S. (2010). “Impacts and implications of the
child- parent center preschool program.” In A. Reynolds, A. Rolnick, M. Englund &
J. Temple (Eds.), Childhood Programs and Practices in the First Decade of Life: A
Human Capital Integration (pp. 168-186). New York, NY: Cambridge University
Press.

[15] “Hawai‘i State Funding for Private Early Childhood Education
Programs.”Amendment 4. Ballotpedia, 1 May 2015. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.
[16] Lutton, Alison. “Early Childhood Workforce Systems Initiative.” National
Association for the Education of Young Children. Naeyc.org, 5 Dec. 2015. Web.
18 Jan. 2016.
RESPECT, SUPPORT, PROFESSIONALISM
[1] Baker, Eva, Paul Barton, Richard Shavelson, Linda Darling-Hammond, Edward
Haertel, Helen Ladd, Diane Ravitch, and Richard Rothstein. “Problems With the
Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers.” Economic Policy Institute. Epi.
org, 27 Aug. 2010. Web. 20 Jan. 2016.
[2] “A great education begins with well-rounded teachers who model in their own
actions the skills and characteristics they would like students to develop. Now is
the time to recognize that educational leadership is not power over schools and
students…..Rather, it is giving power to those in schools to make the decisions
that work best for the students in each unique school.” Payne, Catherine. “New
Legislation Offers Hope of Improving Public Schools.” Honolulu StarAdvertiser.
Star Advertiser, 21 Jan. 2016. Web. 21 Jan. 2016.
[3] Wilson, Alisha. “An Open Letter to the Leaders of Education.” Medium.
Medium.com, 20 Jan. 2016. Web. 21 Jan. 2016.
[4] Strauss, Valerie. “Teacher Job Satisfaction Plummets - Survey.” Washington Post.
The Washington Post, 7 Mar. 2012. Web. 21 Jan. 2016. Davis, Kelly, and John
Calagna. “The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Challenges for School
Leadership.” MetLife. Metlife.com, 21 Feb. 2013. Web. 21 Jan. 2016.

[5] Zembylas, Michalinos. “Emotions and Teacher Identity: A Poststructural
Perspective.” Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice. Tandfonline.com, 25 Aug.
2010. Web. 21 Jan. 2016.
[6] Woodward, Arthur. “Over-Programmed Materials: Taking the Teacher out of
Teaching.” American Educator. ERIC, Spring 1986. Web. 22 Jan. 2016.
[7]  Archibald, Douglas, and Andrew Porter. “Curriculum Control and Teachers’
Perceptions of Autonomy and Satisfaction.” Education Evaluation and Policy
Analysis. Sage Journal, 20 Mar. 1994. Web. 21 Jan. 2016.
[8] Anderson, Judith. “Who’s in Charge? Teachers Views on Control Over School
Policy and Classroom Practices.” Office of Education Research and Improvement:
Research Reports. Ed.gov, Aug. 1994. Web. 22 Jan. 2016.
[9] May, Donald S. Curriculum Control and Teachers’ Perceptions of Professional
Discretion and Satisfaction. Diss. U of Central Florida, 2010. Orlando: U of
Central Florida, 2010. Print.
[10] Milner, Richard, IV. “Policy Reforms and De-Professionalization of Teaching.”
National Education Policy Center. ERIC, Feb. 2013. Web. 22 Jan. 2016.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Carlgren, Ingrid. “Professionalism and Teachers as Designers.” Journal of
Curriculum Studies. Tandfonline.com, June 2010. Web. 21 Jan. 2016.
[13] Lasky, Sue. “A Sociocultural Approach to Understanding Teacher Identity,
Agency and Professional Vulnerability in a Context of Secondary School Reform.”
Teaching and Teacher Education. Science Direct, Nov. 2005. Web. 22 Jan. 2016.
[14] Pearson, L. Carolyn, and William Moomaw. “The Relationship between Teacher
Autonomy and Stress, Work Satisfaction, Empowerment, and Professionalism,
Educational Research Quarterly, 2005.” Educational Research Quarterly. ERIC,
2005. Web. 21 Jan. 2016.
[15] Pearson, L. Carolyn, and William Moomaw. “The Relationship between Teacher
Autonomy and Stress, Work Satisfaction, Empowerment, and Professionalism,
Educational Research Quarterly, 2005.” Educational Research Quarterly. ERIC,
2005. Web. 21 Jan. 2016.

[5] Hughes, Judith. “The Demise of the English Standard School System in
Hawai’i.” Hawaiian Journal of History 27 (1993): 63-90. Print.
[6] Sai, David Keanu. Ua Mau Ke Ea - Sovereignty Endures: An Overview of the
Political and Legal History of the Hawaiian Islands. Honolulu: Pua’a Foundation,
2011. Print. Perkins, Umi. “Moolelo Refigured: Developing a New Hawaiian
History Textbook: Umi Perkins at TEDxManoa.” Ted Talks. YouTube, 24 Oct.
2012. Web. 22 Jan. 2016.
Perkins, Umi. “Moolelo Refigured: Developing a New Hawaiian History Textbook:
Umi Perkins at TEDxManoa.” Ted Talks. YouTube, 24 Oct. 2012. Web. 22 Jan.
2016.
[7] This narrative challenges the celebratory work of earlier progressive scholars
like Francine Duplexis Gray, who argued in her 1972 Sugar-Coated Fortress
that “Twelve years after statehood (while the economic power and profit margins
of the Big Five remained undiluted), Hawai‘i could be described as having “the
greatest racial equality, the highest union wages, the most efficient welfare system,
the highest voter participation, and the robust liberal legislature of any state in
the Union” (Forbes, Robert. “The Education of a Territory: Origins of Hawaiian
Statehood.”  Origins of Hawaiian Statehood. Academia.edu, Dec. 2010. Web. 22
Jan. 2016). Wist, Benjamin. “A Century of Public Education in Hawai‘i, October
15, 1840-October 15, 1940.”  The Hawai‘i Educational Review. SearchWorks,
2000. Web. 22 Jan. 2016.
[8] Dotts, Cecil K., and Mildred Sikkema.  Challenging the Status Quo: Public
Education in Hawai‘i, 1840-1980. Honolulu: Hawai‘i Education Association,
1994 (45). Print.
[9] Ibid, 55.
[10] Ibid, 73.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid, 104.
[13] Hughes, Judith. “The Demise of the English Standard School System in
Hawai’i.” Hawaiian Journal of History 27 (1993): 67. Print.

[16] Torres, Carlos Alberto. “No Child Left Behind: A Brainchild of Neoliberalism
and American Politics.” New Politics. Newpol.org, Winter 2005. Web. 22 Jan.
2016.

[14] Bayer, Ann Shea. Going Against the Grain: When Professionals in Hawai?i
Choose Public Schools Instead of Private Schools. Honolulu: U of Hawai?i, 2009.
Print.

[17] Katrijn, Ballet, Geert Kelchtermans, and John Loughran. “Beyond
Intensification Towards a Schotarship of Practice: Analysing Changes in Teachers’
Work Lives.” Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice. Tandfonline.com, June
2006. Web. 22 Jan. 2016.

[15] Dotts, Cecil K., and Mildred Sikkema. Challenging the Status Quo: Public
Education in Hawai‘i, 1840-1980. Honolulu: Hawai‘i Education Association,
1994 (116). Print.

[18] Perkins, Douglas, and Mark Zimmerman. “Empowerment Theory: Research
and Applications.” American Journal of Community Psychology. PubMed, Nov.
1995. Web. 22 Jan. 2016.

[16] Dotts, Cecil K., and Mildred Sikkema. Challenging the Status Quo: Public
Education in Hawai‘i, 1840-1980. Honolulu: Hawai‘i Education Association,
1994. Print.
[17]
Reinecke, John. “One-Sixth Of Hawai‘i Students Attend Private
Schools.” Honolulu Record. CLEAR.org, Dec. 2014. Web. 23 Jan. 2016.

[19] Maton, K., and D. Salem. “Organizational Characteristics of Empowering
Community Settings: A Multiple Case Study Approach.” American Journal of
Community Psychology. U.S. National Library of Medicine, Oct. 1995. Web. 22
Jan. 2016.

[18] Keany, Michael, and Tiffany Hill. “‘The Death of Public School’: Ten Years
Later.”  Honolulu Magazine. Honolulumagazine.com, 2 May 2011. Web. 22 Jan.
2016.

[20] Udom, Udoh Elijah. What Makes Students Tick?: Unlocking the Passion for
Learning. Bloomington: Balboa, 2014. Print.

[19] “Superintendent’s Annual Report.” State DOE Accountability. ARCH, 2014.
Web. 07 Jan. 2016.

CRITICAL NEED FOR FUNDING

[20] Eagle, Nathan. “Board Chair: Schools’ Brick-And-Mortar Projects ‘Woefully’
Underfunded.” Honolulu Civil Beat. Civil Beat, 26 Oct. 2012. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.

[1] Kame’eleihiwa, Lilikala?. Native Land and Foreign Desires - Ko Hawai?i ?a?ina
a Me Na? Koi Pu?umake a Ka Po?e Haole: A History of Land Tenure Change
in Hawai?i from Traditional times until the 1848 Ma?hele, including an Analysis
of Hawaiian Ali?i Nui and American Calvinists. Honolulu: Bishop Museum,
1992. Print. Osorio, Jon Kamakawiwo?ole.  Dismembering La?hui: A History of
the Hawaiian Nation to 1887. Honolulu: U of Hawai?i, 2002. Print. GoodyearKa?o?pua, Noelani. The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter
School. St. Paul: U of Minnesota, 2013. Print.

[21] Villarreal, Pamela. “How Much Are Teachers Paid: Nationwide Analysis of
Teacher Pay?” Highlights from Education at a Glance (2014). National Center for
Policy Analysis, Sept. 2014. Web. 22 Feb. 2016.

[2] Dotts, Cecil K., and Mildred Sikkema.  Challenging the Status Quo: Public
Education in Hawai‘i, 1840-1980. Honolulu: Hawai‘i Education Association,
1994. Print.

[24] Analysis of Spending in America’s Largest School Districts. Ballotpedia.org,
17 Nov. 2014. Web. 23 Jan. 2016.

[3] Kent, Noel J. Hawai‘i Islands Under the Influence. Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i,
1993. Print.
[4] Odgers, George Allen.  Educational Legislation in Hawai‘i, 1845-1892.
Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i, 1932. Print.

[22] “Hawai‘i DOE Budget Sheet.” Hawai‘i Public Schools. Hawai‘ipublicschools.
org, Dec. 2015. Web. 22 Jan. 2016.
[23] “A Profile of Illinois Public Schools in 2013-14.” (2015): 1-8. Illinois State
Board of Education Schools & Districts (Annual Report). Isbe.gov, Mar. 2015.
Web. 22 Jan. 2016.

[25] Kalani, Nanea. “Increases Stacking up.”  Honolulu Star Advertiser.
Staradvertiser.com, 12 July 2015. Web. 23 Jan. 2016.
[26] Kalani, Nanea. “Private Schools Cite Increased Costs for Higher
Prices.” Honolulu Star Advertiser. Staradvertiser.com, 07 Apr. 2014. Web. 23 Jan.
2016.

CONTRIBUTORS
SPEAKERS BUREAU
Debbie Anderson
Waiakea Intermediate School (Hilo)
Mireille Ellsworth
Waiakea High School (Hilo)
Mitzie Higa
Ewa Makai Middle School (Central)
Andy Jones

Radford High School (Central)
Alexander Kendrick
Kalani High School (Honolulu)
Terry Low
Kauai High (Kauai)
Jessica Whitsett
Ma‘ili Elementary (Leeward)
Tracy Monroe 
Ilima Intermediate (Leeward)
Lisa Morrison
Maui Waena Intermediate (Maui)
Michal Nowicki
University Lab School (Honolulu)
Amy Perruso
Mililani High School (Central)
Cynthia Tong
Waipahu Intermediate (Leeward)
Sandra Webb
Mililani High School (Central)
K. Raina Whiting
Naalehu Elementary (Hilo)

POLICY ADVISOR
Kris Coffield

DESIGN EDITOR
Chris Mikesell

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