Current Issues in Hawaii Education
The Learning Coalition is a community facing organization dedicated to excellence in Hawaii’s public schools. We believe that in order to achieve and sustain excellence, our stakeholders and systems must communicate effectively, trust each other and align efforts and resources. We also believe that our families and communities must be full partners in the process. To that end, everything we do is considered in light of how it empowers and enables leadership among our stakeholders as well as fosters a culture of collaboration and partnership within our educational system.
What we have learned is that the public private partnerships we envision are dependent on the creation and maintenance of purposeful and trusting relationships. Further, that to establish these relationships we must constantly revisit how we perceive, communicate, collaborate and share resources. We have to collectively raise expectations of each other and ourselves, especially our children. What’s more, we need to be strategic and compassionate in how we pursue these goals out of respect to our families and the huge burdens they already bear as well as to our teachers, principals and school staff.
What we know is that there are as many ways to approach this work as there is diversity among our students, families, schools and communities. We imagine success will look different in every community and every school. Nonetheless, we think that there are shared elements that must exist within our schools, families and communities in order to meet the adaptive challenges we face.
September 20th, 2010 at 5:25 am
School choice, school choice, SCHOOL CHOICE!
Vouchers! That should be one of your highlighted issues. Or some other system of accountability that puts choice in the hands of parents & students and punishes the greedy unions, failing schools, and lousy teachers.
Charter schools are a nice start too, but status quo teachers and the politicians who buy their votes have made sure that funding for charter schools has been cut dramatically.
Break the stranglehold the HSTA and others have on our children’s future.
Let freedom ring!
October 29th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Teaching sex ed as an abstinence-only process and teaching homosexual sex ed are two completely separate issues. I’ll focus on abstinence-only.
What should be taught is:
1) What heterosexual sex is, and how it is done.
2) What STDs are, and what effects they have on the body.
3) How to avoid unwanted conception through safe use of methods available (including, but not limited to, abstinence, condoms, birth control, and so forth).
4) How to avoid STDs through safe use of methods available.
The decision about what a student may or may not learn from this process may be made by the parent, who can then choose to include or exclude their student from portions of the class. Alternative activities or classroom sessions may be done for students who have had parental decision to not put them in these portions of the class.
October 25th, 2008 at 11:03 am
The main problems facing Hawaii’s public schools are the lack of vision by BOE and DOE policy makers and the complacency of the public towards education. The best solution to improving education by our policy makers is paper and pencil tests; and the reaction by the public is “hey, look where paper and pencil got me.” There is a new form of literacy that guides student consciousness. The policy of BOE and DOE officials is to prohibit student literacy at public schools, and the form of literacy is so pervasive that the public does not even recognize it as literacy. The literacy that is prohibited by policy and unseen by the public is the sum total of electronic communication that provides the self expression of our society. However, because of the economic terror of NCLB, policy makers believe there is no other path to literacy than the one marked by the testing industry. And the public which is both programmed by and consumers of the electronic communication which comprises the literacy of our children, is held hostage by the threat of higher taxes if policy makers refuse federal education dollars. Yet, every test-dated-year that passes us by is another year leading us further away from addressing the main problem of education: relevance. Until classrooms and what is done inside classrooms reflect the society surrounding schools, then public school will remain hostage to sightless policy makers and public ignorance.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:41 am
I would like to know each candidates position on sex education in the DOE. Currently we simply teach abstinance. If the state ever chooses to teach sex ed. we will have to decide what kind of sex ed. to teach. There are many homosexual potical groups pushing for homosexual sex ed. to be taught in public schools. I hope we just keep teaching abstinance and avoid opening that messy can of worms.
September 29th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
It baffles me why we pay such a huge amount of money to recruit and relocate individuals from out of state for teaching and mental health services. Additionally, these individuals are awarded cost of living allowances which are quite substantial. Why aren’t more aggressive and innovative approaches being deployed to recruit locally and take the money targeted for out of state workers to boost the pay of local teachers and mental health specialists. Have we ever taken a closer look at the monies also being expended on travel costs for the DOE and looked for successes which correlate to spending such huge amounts on travel expenses. Are we flying workers coach or are we paying for costly first class and business class travel for DOE executives and recruiters?
September 20th, 2008 at 1:34 am
Drugs test yes.
We the People should decide who runs out school if it get in control of the governor then it becomes just another kick back Job.
September 15th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
They need to conform more to the needs of behavior problem children, not try to force them to be like all the non-problem children. It gets no where and they fall further behind. If a child needs to excel, let them, don’t hold them back in order to keep them with the class. There should be more new ideas to help these children succeed. Schools should be willing to bring on new changes and not limit or expect every child to learn the same way.