Background on the Hawaii Department of Education

Hawaii’s public education system is the only one in the country that operates under a single, statewide school district.

The $2.5 billion DOE budget has grown by $1 billion over the last 10 years, while student enrollment has dropped by several thousand. Hawaii’s taxpayers spend more than $14,500 per student for public education.

There is an 88,000 person payroll with only 170,000 students in the Hawaii Public School System. Just over 10,000 of those employees are classroom teachers. Personal information of those employees is kept on 3 X 5 index cards rather than being housed electronically, so the information is not easily searchable. However, the DOE has 50,000 computers networked in classrooms and 1,200 servers. And yet, the Department of Education (DOE) accounting department does not link with the DOE budget department. This means that the DOE lobbies the Legislature for millions in emergency funding each year, even while their accounting department shows a multi-million dollar carryover.

The teachers’ collective bargaining agreement negotiated by the Hawaii State Teachers Association limits instruction to 1,415 minutes per week or approximately 4.5 hrs per day.  Hawaii has the lowest number of school instructional days in the country, currently 161 days due to 17 furlough days throughout the school year that the Board of Education agreed to in the teachers’ collective bargaining agreement.

The DOE has statewide standards, but no K-12 curriculum to provide content for those standards. The Hawaii State Assessment, therefore, does not measure what children are learning in school, and Hawaii consistently ranks at the bottom nationally in statewide test scores.

The longer students remain in public schools, the less academically educated they get, according to standardized scores. Hawaii’s students scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reveal that 1/5 of all students function at grade level or above in reading — and 1/4 of all students function at grade level or above in mathematics, with 4th graders performing a little higher. Only 15 to 20 percent of all students tested ranked at grade level in writing and science.