Guest: Rep. Roy Takumi, chair of the House Education Committee.
February 9, 2004

Rep. Takumi started by asking participants to introduce themselves.
"Know thy audience," he quipped.

"I could tell you how they (laws) are supposed to be made. But we all know that's not how it's done.

"This is the 4th committee I've chaired during 12 years in the Legislature."
"Every (committee) chair is different."
"If you think back: why did you decide to buy car, to live how you live? You made choices based on the best information you had available at the time, and you hope you made the right choice. Life is about making choices. And life is also about making mistakes."

"Unlike buying a car-where you can delay the choice-our process has deadlines. If you don't make decision, the decision is made for you."

"There's often a gnawing feeling that you may not be right."

"If you proceed with absolute certainty, that's when policy makers get dangerous. There are no absolutes."

"I've never had a bill where everyone supported it. Otherwise this would be very easy."

"In my community of roughly 24,000 potential voters, we all agree with your vote? It's never happened."

"In testimony to my committee, I've had people come to present emotional testimony. 'I hope you have the courage to kill this bill'...and then the next person testifies, 'I hope you have the courage to pass this bill.'"

"You all know what's important to you and your family and the values you have."

"But if you don't know anyone who has been a victim of domestic violence, then you might wonder why the government should be in the business of building safe shelters. But if you do know a victim, you're going to be a strong advocate of government action."

"Same thing with senior centers. If I don't know anyone who takes advantage of them, then you might oppose spending the money. But if your mom or grandfather or another famiy member goes to a senior center and really enjoys i, you'll be the last one to say 'cut that out'".

"We all want to make decisions on the basis of where we sit.
I have to make decisions on the basis of where everybody else sits."

Sometimes we're making decisions where they (the public) don't realize it's in their best interest."

"If you put your finger to the wind ("what do the polls say today?) then you wouldn't need us here. You elect all of us to make the best decisions that we can-that's representative democracy."

" You need skin like leather, can't have thin skin."

"You always know some people don't like you out there, but when you run for office you know exactly how many."

After the election, you just try to do the best you can to represent the interests of the community.

"I never tell people: I want to do what is best for the community. I aways say: some of you will be happy with me."

"If you believe an unfettered free market economy is best, don't vote for me.
I believe the government's role is to look at matters like corporate accountability, taxes, workers compensation reform, minimum wage.
I've had people tell me you shouldn't have a minimum wage. If people want to work for $2 an hour, it's their business. I don't agree."

"That's what it is. Politics-in the broadest sense- is about competition among legitimate interests."

"All these people who talk to me about an issue have legitimate points of view.
For the most part, people are thoughtful, articulate, knowledgeable. Not wrong or right, but different."

"If you come in (to the Legislature) with no values, you'll get messed up. You have to be pretty well grounded before you're elected."

"I also say: this is not about what's in the media."

Two years after I got into office, you would have thought all we did was guns, gambling, and gay marriage. And yet there were 4000 bills.
Most of it is deadly boring. Policy-making is deadly boring.

It's (the Legislature) like a detective on surveillance watch. There are hours and hours of deadly boring, then suddenly the suspect comes out and everything happens at onece, it's suddenly all exciting.

Take Workers Comp as an example. There are different types of injuries. Categories.
There was a bill to change the compensation for permanent partial injuries. Lose a finger, hand. Lose something like that and you can no longer use it. Under old schedule, if you were a pizza delivery person or architect with the same injury, compensation would be based upon your income. If you both lost hands, the pizza person would get less than architect.

So people lobbied, saying permanent injuries should be treated the same regardless of income. The business community opposed the change, saying it would lead to fraud. I thought, hey, it's very hard to fake losing a limb. They said it would increase rates. They were right. After several years, a study showed rates went up 1% because of this law.

So you're sitting here in the Legislature. That's a legitimate point of view.
On the one hand, on the other hand.
But you've got people who, through no fault of their own, they're only making minium wage. Is their loss of a limb worth less? Where do you go-how do you vote?

"This all got zero news coverage, by the way.
But I would assert, to the contrary, that type of issue has a deeper impact than something like legalized gambling."

It's impossible to read all 4,000 bills, and if you read them you wouldn't understand a lot of them. For example, I started out knowing nothing about insurance, although I know a lot now.

I'm chair of the Education Committee. Roughly 200 to 300 bills come to my committee. I have to decide almost immediately what bills to hear . We only have about 2-1/2 weeks before bills have to be moved to the next committee.

Takumi rattled off a list of issues from vocational training to pre-school to athletic directors, and on and on.

"If you're the chair, you're not up to speed on all those issues when you become chair. There's a learning curve."

I've had other committee chairs tell me-if its introduced by a Republican, it's dead. If it's introduced by someone he doesn't like, it's dead.

I feel we should introduce bills without signatures and judge them on their merits. But that wouldn't happen because everybody wants credit for the bill, the idea.

I look and decide whether it's a compelling interest.
If no one talks to me about it, I probably won't hear it. If the very people who claimed to be interested don't call or write or email, the interest must not be that great.
An exception: The governor's bills. The mere fact that the governor introduced them indicates someone is interested.

I will hear every one of the gov's bills.
Last year, we heard 15 of 16 of the governor's bills, and the last bill was similar to another bill that we heard.
In the last year of Cayetano administration, the committee only heard 2/3 of the governor's bills. And he was Democrat.

Lingle's senior policy advisor came to talk to me last year, complaining that we weren't kind to her bills. I had to say 'check your facts'. We heard 15 of 16 bills, more than we did of Cayetano's. So it's not partisan.

In last two years of the Cayetano administration, there were more substantive policy disagreements.

But what makes it frustrating...you can say, oh, it didn't pass because it's partisan. Some of it is just differences between three branches of government.

The people of this state would not like it if the two branches disagreed on everything.

What bills get heard?

Generally I only hear bills that I feel have a chance to get passed. If I don't like a bill or don't think it can pass, I won't put it on the agenda, and I'll explain why to the people who asked. It isn't fair to waste everyone's time on bills that have no chance of passage.

I don't do bills that mandate the Department of Education do something.
In my position, don't hear bills that I believe micromanage the DOE.
Examples: a bill mandating bicycle safety training, or mandating 5 hours per week of PE. It's not our job here to tell the department what to do.
That's the teachers, principals, and the community's job.

We have, in the past, passed over 200 types of programs that they must have, otherwise they violate the law. My goal is to repeal most of those programs.

Some are "sacred cows". The Kupuna program is one.
Who can say it's not a good program? But for every proposal, there are people on both sides.
I get calls from teachers and principals at military schools, those with a high percentage of military dependents-Radford, Leileihua, Pearl City. They say, "most of our students are military dependants who are not going to be here in two years."

So I say, you decide. I think most schools will still have the program. But I don't think the Legislature should dictate to them. The Federal government does that to us often enough (and they and should stop that).

We love telling people what to do, but I say let's back off. I think that's a significant part of what's wrong with the education system today.

The 2nd thing that is unacceptable is the degree to which various agencies dictate how DOE shall do their business.

Capital improvement projects aren't done by DOE. They're done by DAGS (Department of Accounting and General Services).

Remember the UH women's softball stadium where you couldn't see the field?
President Mortimer and UH had zero to do with that softball stadium.
Similarly with the schools. Six months to fix a broken toilet?
Same thing. This isn't controlled by the schools, and it's a system that currently doesn't allow expediency.

DAGS isn't the only one. There's the Department of Health, the Attorney General, and others.

Take the Department of Human Resources Development.
Anytime a job is created, DHRD has to approve the job description.
Some positions are the same across different departments. If the job is classified as a clerk typist, okay, it's the same in the DOE or the DOH. But there are jobs like school psychologist, special education teacher, etc. which exist no where else but DOE, yet each position has to go through Human Resources.
This is very inefficient, and it can take 2 years just to approve the job description.
We have to remove that.

Frankly, any governor could issue an executive order today to de-link departments.
Give me a report now-what functions can be delinked.

To make them (DOE) accountable, we have to make them autonomous.

Those two things we are committed to doing.

The third issue is school financing.
The way we do it in our state-there has been some disagreement. As someone said, statistics are just numbers looking for an argument. My stats are bigger than yours.

But I think we agree that the vast majority in the DOE budget does not get to the individual school

We are proposing a student weighted formula.
In essence, this weights each child by their unique learning needs.
We know a child from poor background has more educaitonal challenges. Child who speaks native langue, with dyslexia, students from rural communities like Molokai that doesn't have access to cultural amenities,where students can't got to the art academny or the symphony. They would get more resources to deal with the challenges.

Seattle school district, with 45,000 students, started a similar system in 1995-96.
There was a lot of opposition. In their system, the principal becomes the chief education officer and make decisions of how to allocate those resources.

The way DOE does it now is a flat linear position count.
If you have 550 students, you get one vice-principal. If you've got just 549, no vice-principal.

So you have a school like Noelani, where only 2% of students qualify for a free or reducted price school lunch.
In Palolo, just one valley over, 97% qualify for the reduced price or free school lunch.

The federal government has Title 1 monies to address these issues.
In our state, the trigger is 35%.
Meet that threshold and the federal money goes directly to the school.
But if they have 30%, they get zero.
We're going to weight these.

Then we tell the principals, you decide what programs are needed to address your unique needs. All I care about as policy maker is results.

Seattle doesn't weight for gifted and talented.
They believe the intent of the policy is to lift up the most disadvantaged.
We might decide to weight for gifted and talented.

Superintendent of Education Charley Toguchi was 'this close' to adopting something like this back in 1994. But he left, Herman Aizawa came on board and had different ideas.

Reviewing these priorities: Repeal categorical programs, delink education from other departments, and a weighted formula for budgeting.

We're going to change the structure of SCBMs.
We have 283 schools, 268 regular schools and the others charter schools.
Of those, 23 don't have an scbm even though we passed a law 15 years ago requiring it.
Biggest reason is the union contract.
80% of teachers have to agree or it can't happen.
We're going to reach in and take that away.
Every school to have by 2005-06 school year.
We don't want the union contract to dictate.

Back to Seattle.
When they did weights, scale 1-9.3.
9.3-$25,000. For conditions like Dyslexia. Autism is off the scale. A tremendous cost to our system, but it's a decision we've made.

Here's how formula would work.
Look at the 31 longs drug stores in the state.
What happens when regional manager comes down from Walnut Creek?
He or she says-all have to sell Mabeline, Tide, etc. because we've cut deals with the manufactuers to buy at low prices. But for every one of you, there's an amount of your budget, do with it what you will.
So at Manoa Longs, the shelf space for wine is incredible
In Pearl City, the only wine is in a box
In Waianae, they're well stocked with fishing supplies.
Because the store manager knows their community.
They have to know the buying habits of their community.
We're going to apply the same business model to the schools.

You should know your community better than politicians, better than the governor, the unions, or the Board of Education.
Take the discretionary part of budget and do what's needed, whatever you think it is.
All we care about is results.

I'm not an advocate of high stakes testing.
But it's a federal law.
There's no denying standardized tests.
I think schools should be judged not compared to where they ought to go, but where they came from.
Compare Palolo and Noelani again.
If Palolo starts down here, and moves up 20 percent, I think that's better than if Noelani, which begins way up the scale, moves up another 2 percent.

2nd point is the budget. Give principals the vast majority of budget.
Are you under budget, keep it.
Are you over? We'll take it out of next year.
If you're on budget, you're doing a good job.

3rd is evaluations.
Every parent, teacher, student, and staff should evaluate the principal.
We don't want a small group of parents controlling the evaluation.
There are always a few who are unhappy people.
They do this in Seattle.
How do you get 2nd grader evaluate the principal?
You ask everybody age appropriate questions.
2nd grader might be asked-do you feel safe when you come to school?
Adults would be asked something quite different.
Aggregate those evaluations and we'll get a good picture.

I guarantee you. When a school does well in all of these, I guarantee this school is doing well.

In Seattle: they had gains in high single digits in 4th and 8th grade reading, writing, and math in 6 year period.
It's not going to happen over night.

Seattle also had a drop of 8% in private school enrollment.
Parents have begun to send their kids back into public schools.
I think that's one of keys-bringing back the middle class parents.
People like my brother in law who spends $13,000 to send son to Iolani.

When My kids went to Maemae School, the principal brageed about students leaving for private school.

One note on test scores.
NAEP scores. One standard test that is used in 4th and 8th, reading, writing , math and science.
They always say Hawaii dead last. We're not.
We are in bottom 25 %.
The other states in the bottom 25% all have local school boards.
So local school boards don't solve your education problems.

We also use the ACT test, which many say is a better indicator.
In that, we are better than national average.
So it depends on what test we use.

Problem-nobody wants to dig into all this detailed stuff. Campaign and issues are reduced to bumper stickers.

Our test scores have increased more than the national average-we made greater gains.
But we started lower, and we're still below the national average.
The whole methodology behind testing. It all depends how you look at it.
Look at cat playing with the mouse. The mouse has a very different point of view. From the mouse's perspective, it's not engaged in a recreational activity.

Rep. Takumi then discussed the problem of reporting average test results.
Bill Gates' neighborhood will look lilke a community of multimillionaires because the billionaire raises the average.

"So similarly with testing and averaging...we're the only state with one system.
Take Texas, with 1043 individual school boards and a 10-1 disparity in budgets.
When you average them out, they look better.

The kids on leeward coast would not test as high as kids in east Honolulu.
We don't average because we're got just a state system.

School boards.
"I think what should drive the debate has to first and foremost be about student achievement. It should not be about campaigns, targeting the House or trying to take over the House, and should not be that you don't believe it will make a difference. It should be about student achievement."

Should districts be large or small?
Research is very sparse on that point.
And on whether the board should be elected or appointed-no research at all.
But there is a huge body of research showing small schools get better educational results.
Farrington with 2500 students-this huge school is not going to do as well as three schools of 800 kids each.
There's also a link between smaller class size and achievement, a smaller link but it's there.

And then, of course, we need teachers.

Five factors.
First, Leadership.
"I use example of former UH football coach Bob Wagner. When he left, that was change, but the football team went to 0-12. Change wasn't better."

Second, qualified teachers.

Third, incentives. Both principals and teachers have to have the incentives. Not necessarily higher pay, but things like access to professional development. Today, if they want further professional development, they pay out of their own pocket.

Fourth, Curricula. It has to be sequential and integrated. When people say the system is top down, I have to laugh. Every individual teacher decides what curriculum to use. It's up to the teacher. Not the school, not the complex, not the Board. What book to use, or whether to use a book or not., the teacher decides. We have to put an end to that. It is too decentralized.

Finally, we have to provide a safe and healthy campus.

If we do all five things with or w/o local school boards, we'll get results.

At the turn of the century, this country had about 150,000 local school boards.
The trend has been consolidation.

Take the City of New York, for example. It had 32 local boards. Voter turnout in school board elections averaged about 10%.
When Bloomberg became mayor, he abolished the 32 local boards. They're going to go with one.
It will have 1.2 million students and 1000 schools.
And they're going to go with one curriculum.
There's precendent for this in the Department of Defense schools. They have one curriculum. They know if parents gets transferred from Okinawa to Spain, their children will have a smoother transition because they're going to use the same textbook.

Generally, the move has been to consolidate.
But I want to keep an open mind on local school boards, but I have to be convinced that its being done on basis of research that proves better educational results.
There's a romantic populist tinge to the school board debate, 'Let the people decide.'

But there are many issues where the Governor opposes letting the people decide.
We heard another bill which would remove the governor's line item veto power.
Right now the DOE has no budget predictability. They have no way of knowing if budget we (the Legislature) pass is the budget they can expect to be working with.
Most states don't have line item veto.
The (Lingle) administration came in and opposed that.
They said, 'That would be a constitutional question.'
When B&F was asked, 'why not let people decide?' Their response: This would really have an impact on the budget.

2nd example.
43 states elect their Attorney General.
After all, the AG is really the people's attorney, not the governor's attorney.
For years, the Republicans in our House always put that in their leg package.
But they don't have in their package this year. Because the governor opposes it.

My point is that I'm not a big fan of throwing all kinds of things on the ballot.
I believe we are a representative democracy. For better or worse, you've elected us to sit here and try to make the best decisions we can.
There are times to put things on ballot but to me it's a move that should be taken very very seriously.

Congress.
About 11,000 bills introduced to amend the consitution.
How many amendments do we have? 27?
Last passed in 1970.
Here we are 34 years later.

Q: You keyed on Seattle, Washington school system.
Their principals are not part of union.
They have their own management unit.
Might be problem to move measurement system from there to here.

Roy: In Edmonton, Canada, their principals are in union.
I've come to conclusion. We can look at these examples. By law, we have questions.

Principals have building tenure. We're going to have to take a long look at that.

I'm not about to say, let's kick them out of the union.
40% are eligible to retire in the next 5 years.
The last thing we need is mass exodus.

It is a huge change. If you try to embark on giving resources to school, taking principals out of union, etc. I'm afraid system will implode.

Q: How do you get rid of poor performing principals?

Roy: The goal is not to be punitive. You would look at what's wrong.
Was this person not good with budget? Curriculm? In evaluation, would figure out strength and weakness. Do they need additional training to bring them up to speed?
Last-
Usually pick the best teachers to become principals.
That's always an option. Go back to teaching.

In Edmonton-have let go only 3 principals in 35 years.

The goal is to lift the principals' level of ability and skills so that they can be effective.

Sometimes just don't fit-as priests in congregation.
They say, there must be a congregation for you somewhere.
We have someone who came from an elementary school on Molokai and moved to largest school in state.

School site council will be able to select.

It's not a perfect system. My goal isn't to protect incompetent people.

Q: How can we address school size?

In Kapaa. Had 8 schools operating within that elementary school.
It's the "school within a school" idea.
In a sense, like a university campus.
Once you do core courses, there are many buildings you never go into.
That's not your shtick.
We can create these pockets.
We have that to some extent with magnet schools.
I say, leave to principals to decide.
I believe in small schools, but don't think we should impose by law.

What pearl city has done.
Assign every adult counselor, principal and teacher, to students.
17 kids to one adult.
During the coruse of the year, they will sit down with each student, find out what's going on with them.

It provides an adult presence at a fairly intimate level.
Will it succeed? I don't know.
Should we let it happen? Absolutely.

Q: Testing. Hawaii not unique.
Maybe not right to use only one test.

Roy: no child left behind.
Terrible implementation.
Requires English testing.
Also requires 95% attendance for test-test taking rate.
Who's responsibility is it to assure that 95 % show up?
There are social and family problems that are beyond the schools' control.