Welcome
Everyone seems to have an opinion about education and they seem more than happy to share it. Nelson Mandela called education the most powerful tool you can use to change the world, while Mark Twain joked that he never let his schooling interfere with his education.
One thing we can agree on: We all want our children to have the best education possible — one that will help them to achieve their potential in life, no matter which path they choose.
Our kids in Hawaii deserve our best efforts to give them a good start on life, and we have a unique opportunity to do just that. With a culturally rich and ethnically diverse student population, Hawaii represents a microcosm of the world’s future. We have teachers, principals and administrators deeply committed to equipping our children with the knowledge and skills they’ll need, and parents ready to support them in their efforts. We have a Board of Education responsible for setting policies and standards to ensure all children a quality education, regardless of their economic background or ZIP code. By working together and coordinating our efforts, we have the potential to transform our island state into an educational model for others to emulate.
The Learning Coalition is a non-profit, non-partisan organization with a single mission – to improve the quality of Hawaii’s public educational system by:
- Encouraging the growth of successful ideas and small-scale initiatives already at work within Hawaii’s schools so their benefits can be enjoyed on a broader scale throughout the system, and
- Actively informing the community and its citizen-voters about the importance of casting educated votes to select members of the Board of Education, the public school system’s policy-making body.
Like so many of you, we believe Hawaii’s educational system can flourish. To accomplish this, we need to act now and to be as smart about education in Hawaii as we want our children to be. We hope you’ll be a frequent visitor to this website and will join the growing numbers who support excellence in Hawaii’s public schools.
October 28th, 2008 at 3:44 am
Why are you supporting the union on the issue of drug testing? The teachers agreed to the testing and now are backing off. Just implement and pay for it. Or give back the pay raises. Better yet, disband the union and divert the dues to testing.
October 5th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Amen to Tom from Ahuimanu. I fully support a total revamp of the DOE (Dept of Educ). It is simply NOT WORKING. It’s a HUGE, dysfunctional organization, with no will to make actual changes. We need to completely reoganize the DOE –starting by electing non-DOE biased citizens to the group that is SUPPOSED TO oversee the DOE, the Board of Education! I say, vote OUT every incumbant. It’s past time for a real change!
September 25th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Thanks for this work. The website content was an invaluable source of information on the BOE candidates leading up to the primary, and helped me to feel much more confident in casting my votes this time around.
Would love to see a non-partisan source of information such as yours to help clarify individual issues that get put on the ballot in future elections. Have experienced challenges in finding a clear and central source of information when these come up…room to expand, perhaps.
Keep up the good work…will follow your updates into the general election.
September 20th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Today is the day
September 15th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
As a parent whose child is in his fifth grade year at a public charter school,I firstly am seriously concerned about the decisions that the BOE has made regarding the cutting of funding to charter schools even though many charter schools provide a higher quality of education overall. Why aren’t they instead looking at what makes these schools work better? I now face the nerve wracking decision about where to send my child to middle school many of which are considered failing schools. Talk is cheap…enough talk already… it’s time to reevaluate those who are currently serving on the BOE. How many of the current BOE members have or have had children who attended private schools instead of a public school. It is a safe bet to say that given the current state of Hawaii’s public school system that it is a broken system led by people who appear to be completely not invested in allowing for the changes that will help fix the school system. I am single parent with a child who is a straight A student. My child deserves a quality education and as taxpayer I should not have to lose sleep over worry that I might not be able to provide that education for my child. I want to thank whoever is behind this site and it is my hope that the parents of Hawaii this time will go beyond the familiar name or the popular vote and really vote for those people who will REALLY bring some much needed changes into the Hawaii public school system!!
September 12th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
I saw The Learning Coalition ad in MidWeek, and just checked out the website. I really don’t think “Everyone has an opinion about our public school system…” because opinions are based on good information — a scarce commodity in this discussion. But I do get the feeling many of us have an impression. As I think most would agree, it is not a good impression.
My take is that the DOE is a self-serving bureaucracy with poor leadership. After all, does it not put its own administrative needs and demands ahead of what happens in the classroom? (Why doesn’t the DOE cut its own administrative budget before it even considers robbing programs from students?) The BOE, too, has been highly ineffective. Both are “very busy”. But, ultimately, ineffective. Period.
Let’s keep it simple. If the DOE is failing, why continue its existence? At least, not in its current form. If the BOE is ineffective, let’s reshape it. Take it from a top-down statewide posture to a grassroots model firmly planted at the community level.
As a parent of both private and public high school students, my focus has been and still is the high schools themselves. If it is our assumed goal to have public high school students experience sound learning, graduate and earn the choice of attending college or not, then let’s put our combined focus on our high schools. And design around them a true support mechanism — call it whatever you wish — that allows them to succeed.
By that, I believe that each public high school should be firmly grounded in and supported by its own community in its day-to-day functioning. And certainly not by the state, other than have a state administrative process distribute tax dollars back to the schools. Make each high school’s community its own school district. Include its “feeder” schools — intermediate and grade schools.
The legislature would fund each school district based on the number of all potential school-age students living within that school district’s geographic boundary. Each school district would have its own (community-based) board of education which would be elected by voters in that school district community. At the same time, the state legislative representatives involved with those communities would be more accountable to and involved in his or her public schools.
The constitutionally-mandated DOE would need to be “reborn” (i.e., totally dismantled, and then reorganized in a streamlined fashion) to support its community-based school districts. This administration would truly work for the schools, and not mandate to them from the top down.
We need to get our communities directly and actively involved with their public schools at all levels. The formalized state education community (DOE/BOE) has failed its island and neighborhood communities. We have already proved that the nation’s only statewide public school system is an utter disaster. We need to stop putting Band-Aides on this brain hemorrhage.
If we don’t, the total collapse of our public education system is not too distant. Of course, under current circumstances, the DOE and BOE would just love to keep us all only more confused with a lot of bluster, studies, activities and typical bureaucratic blundering. After all, that’s what the DOE and its BOE really do, which only creates environments for failure. Just visit a few public school campuses…it’s right there in front of you.