If Education Secretary Arne Duncan is serious about educational reform - and we believe he is - we hope "The Race to the Top" program means he is also looking close to home.
Much is made in Hawaii about the ineffectiveness of our one-of-a-kind statewide Department of Education. It is argued that this large bureaucracy serves no purpose other than to provide jobs for a unionized work force. The current governor bemoans the $2 billion per year given to a bureaucracy that year after year produces astonishingly dismal results in the form of consistently low test scores.
She refers to it as throwing money down a hole.
Yet if one is persistent in trying to find some parallel to the Hawaii Department of Education, the only thing that comes close is the United States Department of Education.
Since its founding in the May 1980, the U.S. Department of Education has one notable achievement:
Standardized test scores have been in a consistent nosedive.
In the presidential election of 1980, candidate Ronald Reagan promised to abolish the then-new U. S. Department of Education. By 1982, President Ronald Reagan realized that it was a hopeless task trying to get rid of thousands of firmly entrenched bureaucrats.
But the similarity between the U.S. Department of Education and the Hawaii Department of Education is remarkable. Each is a massive bureaucracy taking dollars that should be in the classroom in the form of higher pay for teachers and world-class facilities. Each has consistently produced lousy results.
So while we bemoan Hawaii's elimination from the first phase of the federal government's "Race to the Top" grant program, we'd urge Secretary Duncan to look at his own department. If he really wants reform in education, perhaps he should see what streamlining can be achieved there.
Maybe Secretary Duncan's ultimate "Race to the Top" answer is simple - trim the federal bureaucracy and put the dollars saved into local classrooms.
* Editorials reflect the opinion of the publisher.
