 Aloha and welcome to this show the state of the state of Hawaii on the ThinkTech Hawaii live streaming network series. ThinkTech Hawaii broadcasts from our studio at 1164 Bishop Street at the core of downtown Honolulu. I'm your host Stephanie Stoll Dalton. Today, our guest is Dr. Ronald Gallimore, an emeritus UCLA professor and former University of Hawaii psychology professor. In this interview, we will tell a story from the early days of Hawaii statehood when the young state started on its path to become a nationally acclaimed research center on minority education issues. That took a while to do, but it did take us there. The story we discussed today is about the first step on that path. It came about with changes in state political leadership and the new goals set for all the state's citizens welfare. These conditions led to an ambitious education project for the time. And it was to know more about how to help Hawaiian students succeed in the state's public schools. One way to proceed was to study the problem. And indeed, a study was supported by prominent leaders and educators and numerous agencies such as the commandment schools, Bishop of State, Bishop Museum and other local agencies. My guests, Dr. Ron Gallimore and his research colleagues at the time were tasked by the Bishop of State trustees to conduct a leeward coast study of Hawaiian community and culture. Dr. Gallimore is most qualified to discuss this first step, the beginnings of what will be a success story, and especially he can tell us about the challenges and the findings and steps to success in the process of improving Hawaiian students performance in the state's public schools. Welcome, Dr. Gallimore, and thank you for joining us today for this interview conversation. Well, thank you, Stephanie, and I hope for the rest of our discussion, you'll call me Ron. I feel a lot younger if you did. Thank you. I had that as my first question. I said, okay, to call you Ron. Good, we've known each other for a long time as this work, as our capacity to talk about this work together shows. So I think that you are the one to help us remember what that work was that this state took on and succeeded with and became prominent for it. But I'd like to know if you're willing to talk about it, and certainly it seems like a good place to start about how you got involved with this work when you came to Hawaii. I'm not sure that you came to Hawaii for this work, but that's interesting too. So if you could tell us how you did get involved. Well, I'll start with a quick personal anecdote. I got a PhD in clinical psychology from Northwestern in 1964, and was appointed assistant professor of psychology at Cal State Long Beach. And this is in the middle of the civil rights movement. And I was like many young people at the time quite involved in trying to solve some of the problems that had risen in the history of our country. And on weekends, I would volunteer at a local community organization in the African American community of Long Beach, which was quite a large one. During the week I taught psychology classes. And after a few months of volunteering in a tutoring and head sort center. I quickly noticed that my preparation as a psychology researcher had not prepared me to conduct research in the community setting it. Well, that involved African Americans, I complained to my graduate school advisor, who at the time was on sabbatical in Hawaii, and gotten to know Alan Howard, who was an anthropologist at the university and at the Bishop Museum. And within a few months, my wife and infant daughter and I were on the plane to Honolulu. I left my job in Long Beach. And the next thing we knew, we were living in a rented house on Farrington Highway in Y and I, where I spent the next two years working with families and individuals and non accrual. The reason I wanted to do that was I wanted to work with anthropologists, and I wanted an opportunity to learn how to broaden my ability to work in communities that were different from my own. Although I'd grown up in a Houston, Arizona with many Mexican American friends and classmates. This was my first experience as to do research in a community other than the one in which I came. Well, what? Yes, go ahead. I was going to ask what were the issues, yeah, at the time, yeah. Okay. Well, when I was working in the African American community, I noticed that the students who came to the tutoring center to help us repair the building were extraordinarily competent and able and could learn all sorts of things about painting and carpentry. And they had a marvelous ability to speak and express themselves. But as soon as they were putting in classes or tutoring, it was obvious there was this huge discrepancy between how well they could perform in one setting and the other. And that's what I wanted to learn to do. And eventually, when I did get to non accrual work in the community, I saw the same thing. Native Hawaiian students at school struggle, but if you were in the homes and solve the kind of responsibilities and abilities that they had, it was a remarkable contrast. So it seemed obvious to me that somehow or other, those strengths and those capacities that you saw at home and in the neighborhoods had to be somehow taken advantage of in the schools. And that was the issue. And in some respect, it's the one we still in front. But how I got to Hawaii, that was my interest, but the opportunity was created by people like Myron, Pinkie Thompson, and other leaders of the Hawaiian community in the early 60s. Well, that was my question to their efforts. Yeah, how did how did it get started that you had a place to go and do this study, as you say, with other anthropologists. So how did I mean, here you all were out on the on the Makaha beaches. So how did that how did that site get set up for this serious work on these issues of Hawaiian students education, Hawaiian investors education. In the early in the early 60s, right after statehood, Pinkie Thompson and other leaders formed a committee. It was called the Lillio Kalani Research Committee, and all of the major organizations that were concerned with the Hawaiian people. And by that, I mean the native Hawaiian people, the original inhabitants of the island and their descendants. They put together this committee and they began to research the circumstances and discovering as we, most people would understand things were not very good in some of those communities education performance was low there were health issues, and so forth. The committee decided that they wanted to do an in depth study of a single community, and they chose non accruely. They then recruited the Bishop Museum, and Alan Howard, an anthropologist, and Pinkie Thompson and Alan Howard successfully obtained funding from a national foundation to launch the non accruely community project. And that's the point at which I was given the opportunity to come to Hawaii. Along with Kathy Jordan, it was a graduate student at the university and Joanne and Steve Boggs and both anthropologists who joined the project. So that was the original team. Well, now was that federal funding that was a grant a grant. Where was that original grant from. It was it was federal research funding from one of the National Institute of Health. Oh, yes. Okay, good. They provided they provided the funding was a competitive grant process that Alan and Pinkie succeeded in achieving. And then at the end of the initial funding Alan and I were able to get extended for a couple of years. So the project actually lasted a full five years. Well, good. Well, then I wanted to ask why the work was important. Maybe it would help to know what were the research questions. You were asking and the grant somehow tell us that in the in the 19 if we roll back to the 1960s now we're talking, you know, 50 some years ago or more. There was a big dispute going on whether or not communities like those that have not a Cooley were the problems caused by people lacking the qualities to be successful or were the problems structural that is people didn't have the opportunity. So there was a raging this and it still goes on to some extent but not so out in the open as it was in the 60s. So this this for example would mean when children come to school and they're not successful. Is it, you know, are we going to blame the parents or are we going to try to figure out ways at the school to help the children succeed. And an educator once said, Well, the parents are sending us their best children. So we need to figure out how to help them. So one of the driving forces behind the non equally community study was to learn about the qualities of Hawaiian family life and culture, child ring practices, and to discover the strengths that were present in that community, and then use those to build a better program. For example, better health care or education or any number of other job training, but not go in and assume all these people are missing a lot of stuff and we've got to bring it to them as opposed to let's meet them halfway might be another way to put it. Well, I was going to ask you that what your expectations were truly from having had your experience already in California with other minority students. So that's what I want to so this not bringing them you're not you weren't there with the government money to help them. You were there to learn about them right or tell us about that because that's interesting. Okay, all right. Well, I mean, you could say, we, you know, what we're going to basically do is say listen to what the people had to say, and then help carry those messages back to the policymakers and the practitioners, as opposed to us coming and telling them what to do as researchers. That would be our job is to is to listen and learn and not impose our own views on it. Now, I'm sure I'm guilty of having done some of that and anybody that watches this and goes back and reads the old stuff that was published 50 years ago, they might catch me out. But I will gladly say that no one is perfect when it is but our intentions was to work our intentions were to listen and and reflect back accurately what we learn about the community. Let me tell you a funny anecdote. Two days after I arrived in Hawaii for the first time. And we, Alan and I went to the Nanakuli and they were preparing for the major annual luau. And they put on on July the fourth three scholarship month, the community, I think might still be doing that. I don't know. Anyway, after I was there working in the sun, helping out getting ready. They were practice people were women were practicing the hula on a stage for the performance that would be done the next day. And soon I was being asked to get up and dance. Well, you know, my first I said no no way I'm not doing that, you know, I'm a researcher. Well, of course, I gave in I got up there. And I was surrounded by some elderly kabunas who were dancing around me. And, you know, I learned very quickly that I had to take all that good humor. So one of the things I learned was, you know, don't don't go into Nanakuli and with a stuck up high nose or you're not going to get accepted. So, yeah, in that one little thing you illustrated what what I learned within two days of my first, my first experience in Hawaii. But those are yes. Well, we had a we had quite a big team, you know, Steve and Joanne and Kathy and Alan and others that I could name that and we tried to look at a wide range of things in the community and there were some major findings. Well, I wanted to ask then, you know, how actually did that go? I mean, was everybody because this is 50 years ago. Okay, so there were diverse views about how all of these things worked and what culture was and how communities get things done. So how did how did that all go with with doing the very research that was to go in and to listen into question. I mean, certainly there was a bit of chaos you had to organize just chaos of the word of the ordinary getting things to people to sit down and talk and listen. How did that go? Well, we, we, we tried different ways to get at it. So we use what we call multi methods. So we did a household survey of all 396 households at the time on the Nonakuli homestead, literally a survey. So somebody went in and asked us the original question. It's kind of like a census. We also conducted systematic interviews with mothers who had children at the preschool. We interviewed 100 adolescents at the Wai Nai High School, all of whom were from Nonakuli. We, each of us who worked on the team had a family or so we spent a lot of time with and became principal we would call principal informants and we would go to them and say, Hey, we've been people are telling us this and we would try to pull together from all of these different sources of information, a common interpretation of what was going on. Now, for example, one of the findings was the extent to which the families in Nonakuli used what we called sibling caretaker. That is, children in these households, there were often three or four children, the older children were given major responsibilities for caring for their younger siblings, household duties, cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry. And many of the families felt this was a very important responsibility training and preparation for an adult that would be one of the major findings. The other is the rather remarkable fluency of the parents and younger children, the ability to tell stories in very colorful and tale ways. That would be an example of one of the strengths that wasn't being fully taken advantage of in the public schools. And if we get time later, we could talk about some of the educational research that went on. Yeah. Well, that I wondered how did the people, this must have been the first study to been done. I mean, I mean, maybe there had been others, but certainly it would have been a novel experience for everyone. So what about the rapport issues between, you know, you research. Well, now, you know, I, you know, we're talking now in the 1960s. But we found the community for the most part very receptive. There were no, I don't recall that people were suspicious of us from, although we did learn later that there was a smaller small group that thought we were, you know, from the government. And that they were traditionally Republican. And at the time it was a Democratic administration in Washington, and they were a little more suspicious of us, we heard, but I never encountered any. There was, there was certainly some misunderstandings time. One time the newspaper, one of the local newspapers had a headline about our study that said study blames culture for poor students. Well, we, I had been interviewed and I had said the exact opposite. I said, well, the schools could probably benefit by taking advantage of cultural strengths. But that somehow in the headline got turned into something that I, Alan and I were called into a meet public community meeting at non-ecopono auditorium. And we had to stand on the stage and explain ourselves. It was not pleasant. Yeah, and it must have been explaining about culture and understanding of it. Was that one of the, the learnings or understandings that came out of that work? I mean that, that, I mean there was at that time some real confusion about what culture was and how that functioned. Right, and you know, well, and we, well, I think one of the bent, the values of that was the notion that there was, in non-eculi, there was a robust culture operating among the families and in the community. Of course, there's problems. You know, every community has its problems. But the notion that the problems of non-eculi were the result of, you know, no family values is nonsense. These families had very strong values and they were doing things according to their own cultural practices. And hopefully we helped communicate that. Well, let's talk a little bit about then what the, what the study findings are. I know that there are books and articles and reams of notes on this. But maybe you could talk about meaningful, the most meaningful findings for a general audience like ours rather than a researcher person. Well, we, when we started education was not a particular focus. It was more family life, community life, child rearing practices. But in the community, the more I got involved with this issue that the students at school were struggling. But at home, I would observe the same kids doing remarkable things. So Scott McDonald and other psychologists who was in working in the area at the time. And I started some small-scale work at Nana Ecopono School, which at the time was K-8. And it was a very large campus and quite crowded. And students were struggling and reading and math and so forth. And so we started taking referrals from teachers who were having problems. And we would go to the classroom and we observe and talk to the teachers and talk to the kids. And out of that, about two years of sideline research, this wasn't part of the main community study. We confirmed what I had been thinking all along. The same students or the same children who at home were competent in learning and doing all these things. At school, we're struggling. And that just doesn't make sense. You know, you can't, if a person is competent, they're competent. It doesn't matter the settings that matter. So that then made us look and realize that some of the teachers at Nana Ecopono were very effective. Now, many of them were very young teachers because it wasn't a desirable place. And many of them were recruited from the mainland and they came for maybe a year. And many were younger island taught or trained teachers, but they wanted them to be in Honolulu. So you had a lot of young teachers, a lot of turnover. That was a problem. But there were some very effective ones. So we took some notes and tried to understand why these more effective teachers were being successful. But we ran into this problem. You know, the life of a public school teacher, elementary, middle school teacher, high school teachers, I mean, it's a crushingly hard job if you're trying at all. You know, you're with students all day long. You got to prepare lessons. You got to grade papers. You have to attend, you know, necessary administrative functions, meet with parents. Some teachers have to take additional coursework. So the life is a hard one. So here come a couple of bright-eyed young researchers and they want to try out all this new stuff. And, you know, it takes time. It's going to take time and energy. And there's just not a lot left over. And there was no support, of course. We didn't have any money to support research like that. And here's what, one day, you know, I was full of all these ideas. I wanted to try out. And I was in the parking lot, Nonna Ecopono, and the about to become president of the MAMAA schools, Jack Garville, he was going to become president about a year or so. And said, hey, Ron, you know, I know you all have been doing this research out here for a few years. You got any suggestions for, you know, the MAMAA schools? We want to reach out and help more Hawaiian children throughout the state. You got any ideas? And I said, well, yeah, you know, Jack, we do have ideas, but we're having trouble testing them out because we just don't have any support. We don't, teachers don't have time. We need a situation where we can try some innovative things for teaching, reading, and math, and all the other subjects with Hawaiian children. And he said, well, hey, why don't you give me a proposal? Send along something. So I would overwhelm that. Yes. I mean, what a gift. Because, I mean, but even though there are all these impediments and complexities still, when you got that option, that opportunity, then what were you thinking you were going to be able to do with those findings in the school setting? So having now talked about the challenges of it. So what did you see and you with your colleagues that you talk to? I'm sure. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'll jump right to the idea then. I hustled right back to the university and I went to see my new colleague, Roland Tharp. And I said, Roland, you've done some big projects before. Listen to this. And we came up with the idea. Well, how about we propose to the command man schools that they launch a research effort that will make them the primary expert. The KAM schools would know more about teaching native Hawaiian, any other in the world. And when that information is developed, it's given away to the public schools. And that was the proposal we took the Jack and then eventually went to the trustees and eventually it was funded. And that's how the command man early education or elementary education lab school came to be built. Well, that is, yeah, that was 1971, but that's another whole story. That's the next step of the story. And that's getting on the road quickly, even more quickly to some success. I mean, you already had a success story in the Nanakuli study where there are these findings and then you're projecting to what could be done with those findings to bring some success in the other category of education and improving the public school. The public schooling of these Hawaiian youngsters. So we're kind of running out. That's what we told. Yeah, that's what we told the trustees. Yeah, we learned a lot on Akuli about Hawaiian culture. Let's see if we can make use of it. Yes. And so we're getting out of time and we'll have to wrap up. And I'm going to say I'm Stephanie Stull Dalton. And this is the state of the state of Hawaii on the think tech live streaming network series. We've been talking remotely with Dr. Ronald Gallimore about an early statehood study of Hawaiian community and culture on the leeward coast. Since this work led to Hawaii topping the nation's education agenda for how to improve school success for Hawaiian and other minor minority students. The rest of the success story is to tell in another show. And of course, as a hint and Ron's already given us the hint that command me an early education program developed from the leeward coast study to become a nationally recognized success story for Hawaiian youngsters education. So thank you so much, Ron Gallimore, and I will see you and I will see all of you in the audience again on the next state of the state in Hawaii and Mahalo for your attention everyone. Thank you.