We voted this week at Windward Mall.
I didn’t vote for an appointed school board.
It seems to me that government in Hawaii is already too centralized, with too much power in the governor’s hands. An appointed board would further increase that centralization.
It amazes me that people who have in recent years said they favored breaking up the DOE’s one-big-school-bureaucracy now say they favor one-big-appointing-authority that, it seems to me, will lead to a more monolithic educational system where the board will be more inclined to follow orders from the governor than to follow their own studied beliefs about the correct path to take.
The Board of Regents of the University of Hawaii is also appointed. It hasn’t solved the university’s policy problems. During BOR discussions of budget cuts, program cuts, and faculty layoffs during the worst of the state’s financial meltdown last year, BOR members seemed surprised by the notion that they had a responsibility to be public advocates for higher education and not simply implement directives from the governor. It was something most had apparently not considered before.
In any case, I joined those voting NO on the appointed board.
PBS Hawaii’s Island Insights program featuring school board candidates made me realize how little we hear about and from these candidates before being asked to cast votes. In response to a question about the need for a DOE audit, Kim Coco Iwamoto pointed out that the auditor’s office already lists more than 60 DOE audits. I hadn’t heard this direct response to the audit issue before during this campaign, and it said a lot. If there’s worry about the public’s ability to elect the best candidates, a big boost in their pre-election media coverage would certainly be a good move.
Same thing with the proposal for an “independent” transit authority to administer the city’s rail project. I voted no on that one as well. It’s too easy to simply hide things out of public view by moving them over to a quasi-autonomous agency, where the politics is not gone but remains outside of public view. I would rather take my chances with the messy but open politics of the city council and mayor, especially since there are still many key rail decisions that can or should be open to debate.
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Agree on both counts, and am planning to do the same.
The BOR is exactly what I thought of when considering the merits or drawbacks of an appointed school board.
From the first moment I briefed myself on this issue my feelings hinged on to much power in control of the governor. I actually search for info on DOE candidates and sometimes succeed. Part of voting, I guess.
During the last decade a developer from Maui essentially bought his way on to the UH BOR as I see it. Not a good thing at all.
Some very progressive people whom I greatly respect support the appointed BOE, but I don’t.
You don not have to destroy a village to save it.
A Big NO for me, too, on these issues.
When my daughter was in public school I attended a few meetings of the elected BOE, and that was a demoralizing experience. This was years ago, but I still remember the two very long-term incumbents who actually did seem demented, and the neighbor isle member who was totally uninterested in schools except the ones on his island.
On the other hand, the appointed UH Board of Regents is functional when it works for a supportive governor, dysfunctional when it doesn’t. In my 33 years at UH, the absolute nadir was the Ariyoshi years, when the BOR cared about construction contracts, real estate deals, insulting the f*haole faculty, and not much else — least of all education.
So I’d say Hawaii will get better education policy when it gets more interested in education. Whether it comes by election or appointment, I hope that cultural change arrives one of these years.
Of those 60 audits, how many were conducted by an independent outside organization? Or were they all conducted by the Legislature’s auditor?