by Herman M. Aizawa, Ph.D.
by Herman M. Aizawa, Ph.D.
The year is 2020. What are Hawaii's public school graduates doing in the prime of their careers during the Third Millennium?
On my home's cyberactive info-wall, I read about them and see their progress, reported almost instantaneously by the electronic telemedia. They are engineers working in teams, designing and building environmental heritage parks on Oahu, Maui, Kauai, and the Big Island. They are medical researchers, soon to celebrate the eradication of AIDS. I watch them on Channel 195, affecting legislation on the floor of the United States Senate. Through distance learning, they deliver guest lectures from their posts at the World Bank, Oxford University, and American embassies around the world. I ride with confidence in fourth-generation Concorde jets that they navigate and pilot. I drive a solar car that they've perfected and manufactured in an automobile plant in Ka`u.
I am living out my retirement years with a great sense of pride, because I made a difference in their lives, I contributed to their realizing their potential.
The year is 1994. The time is now. Tomorrow's environmental engineers, U.S. senators, medical researchers, Concorde pilots, successful entrepreneurs, and world-renowned scholars are attending our public schools today.
They are our children. And they depend on us. They will scale the heights, and lead our State, our democracy, and our global village called Planet Earth to greatness - if we, their parents, teachers, neighbors, and friends, honor their potential and deliver our best efforts on behalf of their future and ours. I hope you share this vision.
Highly literate students will be the top line and the bottom line. Student literacy will be the focal point within the Department of Education. Students highly skilled in reading, writing, speaking, and thinking will be the primary aim of the partnership circle around us.
On my first day as superintendent, I said we will focus our attention where it really counts, on the students in the classroom - everything else is secondary. To maintain this focus and support it with seriousness of purpose, I offer a single, guiding principle that I will internalize and model. From today on, any change we make, innovation we introduce, refinement we advance, idea we entertain, direction we follow, or plan we promote, must demonstrate its focus on instruction and how it contributes toward student literacy - or it doesn't get off the ground.
To align and support site-based, shared decision making, I will continue to decentralize the state and district offices. I have requested, however, that the Ke Au Hou plan be reviewed. This review is not so much from the standpoint of flattening the system, or repositioning people from here to there, but to assure that support services and resources are provided to and controlled by the schools, so that valuable services don't fall through the cracks. I will require objective scrutiny and informed judgements of how this decentralization will occur, where it will be done best, and who should do it. With this approach, we will maximize the system's resources to better serve students and schools, while maintaining equity for all.
No other superintendent in recent history has made such a high-stakes commitment. So, you know how serious I am about developing and implementing a comprehensive Assessment and Accountability System rooted in improved student performance. For such a system to be truly comprehensive, it must encompass several key elements:
Once new content and performance standards are adopted by the Hawaii Board of Education, our challenge first will be to offer schools support in developing student literacy, then second, appropriate and accurate tools by which to measure how well students meet the standards. For example, the Hawaii State Commission on Performance Standards' Preliminary Final Report states that high school students should be able to:
The first type of assessment includes the Stanford Achievement Test, now given to every student in grades 3, 6, 8, and 10; the College Board's Scholastic Assessment Test that students take for college admission; and the Hawaii State Test of Essential Competencies, or HSTEC, that students take for graduation. These are one-shot, paper-and-pencil tests similar to the written test we need to pass to get our driver's license.
More and more, however, educators also use performance assessment. This second type is equivalent to the driver's road test. With performance assessments, students demonstrate how well they understand concepts, and how well they can apply the knowledge and skills they've learned. Portfolios, exhibits, speeches, dramatizations, videotapes, and presentations are examples of performance assessment. The Department of Education, like other school systems across the nation, is working on perfecting performance assessment to ensure consistent and accurate judgement about quality. The research, development, and pilot testing of writing, Hawaiian history, and American history performance assessment will be completed this summer.
Following the pattern of developing performance standards and assessment measures for students, I believe we must review existing performance standards and assessment measures for teachers, administrators, and support personnel. I would like to see a personnel evaluation system that assesses competency and performance from our mission perspective of how well our students are succeeding.
For example, perhaps the time has come for us to shift away from PATH, or the Program for Assessing Teaching in Hawaii, our teacher evaluation program that's more than 12 years old. A better alternative might be a professional development model that stresses mentoring for beginning teachers and marginal teachers, professional development portfolios reflecting classroom innovations and action research, and menus of credit courses for deferential or higher pay classification aligned to state-of-the-art instructional practices and skills acquisition.
Along with lump-sum budgeting, schools will have more freedom to use funds for a broad range of pupil needs. Per pupil allocations will be based on such categories as academically at-risk, limited English speaking, low-income, special education, gifted and talented, and so on. How a school uses those funds to benefit students who fit into these categories will be largely a site-based decision.
Technology is a vital part of the infrastructure of education. While satellites tune us into news as it happens, our students should not be limited to "observer-only" roles. Technology is the direct link into the global village. Our students need and deserve opportunities to interact with other students, experts-in-the field, and educational resources anywhere in the world.
Moreover, schools must have access to accurate and appropriate data if they are to improve. I place a high priority on technology for the schools as a basic opportunity-to-learn standard. The enabling legislation to include technology infrastructure for school facilities has been set forth in the 1994 Omnibus Education Act. In addition, Goals 2000 recommends that states establish standards or strategies to provide all students with an opportunity to learn. Because of our commitment to educational technology, the Department will set a high priority on using federal monies from Goals 2000 to supplement state funds to boost technology in the classrooms.
Many people refer to reading, writing, relating, speaking, and thinking as literacy or basic skills. Our schools, particularly our elementary schools, have always focused on these, along with mathematics, as the core of our instructional program. But we haven't been as successful as we could or should be with all students. I hope to change that by promoting the:
SUCCESS COMPACT:
Reading, Writing, Relating
- Every Student, Every Time
First, some background about the Success Compact. It draws upon W. Edward Deming's Total Quality Management concept, particularly in answering the question, "What works best for the learner?" Like a musical theme, "What works best?" is repeated over and over again by students, teachers, and parents, throughout the grades, throughout all subjects, throughout all learning activities, until it becomes ingrained as part of the school's culture or "the way we do things around here."
Building this community of learners where everyone is a teacher and everyone is a student sounds relatively simple. However, in traditional practice, teachers have expected students to fit into their teaching style, rather than diagnosing, analyzing, and tailoring their instruction to maximize students' learning styles.
The "total quality" concept emphasizes learners applying reading, writing, relating, speaking, and thinking skills to subject or content. These particular skills facilitate the communication process, and learning boils down to communication. We read, write, speak, and listen in order to receive and send information. An essential part of being human is interacting with and relating to each other through communication.
Kapunahala, Ka`ewai, and Kapalama schools on Oahu, and Lihikai, Makawao, Wailuku, and Waihe`e schools on Maui are currently using the Success Compact, and making steady and continual progress. Apparently the "Coconut Wireless" has been working overtime, because 40 more schools have already requested training on how to apply the Success Compact in their schools. This is a high priority. We shall provide the necessary support to begin their orientation in the Success Compact by September.
We anticipate that inquiries from other schools and increasing demand for Success Compact training will outstrip our supply of qualified master teachers who provide the school-level training and development necessary for smooth implementation and positive results. To those schools waiting in the wings, we ask for your patience.
There are costs for the training of staff and for providing the master teachers to work with the schools. However, one of the strengths of the Success Compact is that no additional funds are needed to implement this program. Given the flexibility of lump-sum funding, funds from our current allocation can be transferred to provide this needed focus on developing students' literacy skills.
I have taken the first step to identify and redirect funds from my operations to assist these critical and effective programs and practices. We will forego the 1994 Superintendent's Conference and redirect those funds to provide more workshops, training opportunities, personnel, and teacher substitute days to accommodate more schools as soon as possible. I also have asked the seven district superintendents to examine their budgets to provide district funds to support local schools' interests. And, of course, schools that are seriously interested in being part of the Success Compact also need to contribute some of their training funds to this project. The lion's share of the funding for the Success Compact, however, will come from the State Office.
Conclusion
Across the nation and in Hawaii, public education is not enjoying high satisfaction ratings; just as the image of America, American families, and American society is not enjoying the envy and emulation of other nations around the world, as it once did.
But we're resilient; we've come from behind before, and we'll do it again! For me, there is a silver lining in having the challenge to lead people who are dedicated to making a difference, and who share a desire to be a part of something great. We will persevere until all students are able to use the literacy skills of reading, writing, relating, thinking, and speaking, and create for themselves productive, successful, and happy lives.
The final verse of the song "Children Like Me," written by Representative Terrence Tom, sums up our students' mandate to us: