 Hello, and welcome to Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. I'm Hili Akeena, president of the Grassroot Institute. Well, here in Hawaii, one of the most cherished values we have is education. We care greatly for the cakey. Almost everybody knows about our massive public school system, which is run by the State Department of Education, but not everybody is satisfied with it. How are we doing in terms of student performance? How about facilities? What about teacher retention and satisfaction? People are aware that there are problems in these areas, and many people, as a result, have suggested we need more money for the education system in Hawaii. There have been recent efforts to try to raise taxes, property taxes, and GE taxes. They've failed, but there will be more effort. The question I have is this. Is the problem a lack of money? My guest today suggests that that may not be the case, and that we need to apply the right medicine by understanding what's really going on in the Department of Education in our state's public schools. He's Ray LaRue, a former administrator in the DOE, and now he is the president of the Education Institute of Hawaii. He's a good friend, and you've had him on the program before. Please welcome with me today Ray LaRue. Ray, good to have you on the program. Good to be on the show, Kalee. Well, first, let me just say this. Thanks for your years of service as a US Marine. You retired as a colonel. You served our nation well. We appreciate that you're in public service again. Oh, thank you. What has drawn you to be concerned about our educational system here in Hawaii? Well, if you look at, both my kids matriculated through this school system as well, and they did well, but there was a lot of parent engagement and community engagement. When you looked at the model overall, what better way to serve after serving your country, for instance, than serving the kids of the state that you've chosen to call home. So your children went to public school here in Hawaii. They sure did. What do you mean financially to send them to private school, or you could have home schooled them? Sure. But you chose to invest in our public school system. Why was that? Well, I was also a public school kid. I got what I thought was a great swing of the bat in that endeavor. I think in terms of peer-to-peer and growing up with the social aspect of public school, I think you need to do that. And my kids had a wonderful experience on the Kailua side, and they've done well in their adult life as well, and they still call Hawaii home, even though they do live on the mainland, both of them. But when you start looking at the model overall, and why does Hawaii consistently end up in the lower numbers with regards to student achievement, so that was one of the reasons that I wanted to get more engaged. What is happening in this state that is in terms of student achievement with all the money, all the resources, all the input from all stakeholder groups, why aren't we moving the needle with regards to student achievement? Well, you're clearly passionate about your views, and not only that, you are a stakeholder. You've set your kids through the system, and I want to just point out to our audience, you're a fan of the DOE, and you're somebody who's trying to improve it. But you see problems. You started to talk about student achievement, and I think that we've all seen the figures that Hawaii definitely could do better in comparison to other regions in the nation. But what exactly is going on in terms of student achievement that causes people to think that we actually need serious improvement? Well, it's relative as well. So, I mean, if you look at our model overall, it's still kind of a top-down model with a very one-size-fits-all template, which I would then submit that it's a one-size-fits-nothing template. And as you look at the way that kids learn today, going into a 2020 time frame and going five years beyond that, we're still somewhat stuck in an industrialized model of educating. In other words, the way that you and I went to school, you had a learning wall with 30 kids lined up in chairs looking in one direction. Today, kids think differently. They learn differently. There's different inputs, there's different social fabrics that then make up the classroom as well. So when you start looking at what we're going to measure these kids at and then testing to that, and then when I'm talking more about standardized testing at this point, to me, that's become somewhat archaic. It really does hobble the educator, I believe. Well, if you have an inner city school or a school that's rural, that teacher in the classroom, that teacher that has the direct impact, the most influence on that child in the seat in that classroom, in that community, knows best what those children need. And children learn differently. So Ray, you're really talking about a couple of things. One, the mode of education has changed in the 21st century. Correct. Technology and personalization to the individual student. But the second thing you mentioned behind that is that here in Hawaii, we've got a centrally controlled Department of Education and almost, in some senses, a one size fits all. You don't have the diversity that may be needed for modern education. That would be what I'm saying. And I know that this department is trying to kind of move things along with innovative ways of doing that. The superintendent has a strategic plan that looks at student voice and teacher collaboration and school design. What do all of those mean? But unless you've got the resources directed towards that kid in the seat, a teacher slash a principal is not gonna have that much security with regards to what are the resources available to me as a new teacher coming out of a College of Ed anywhere and to a young principal that is now leading that school if they have what they, in their mind, innovative programs for that particular school. So we'll get to this later on. Sure. But I just wanna point out here, you're saying that even if we threw money at the system in terms of student achievement, that may not be the solution because we have much deeper issues that have to be dealt with. I absolutely believe that. In fact, if you look at a lot of the reasons why young teachers in our system are leaving the system and going back to the mainland. Yes, cost of living does get into that one through five. What are the top five reasons you're leaving? But also those freedoms in the classroom, those top down implated modalities of delivery, and frankly the facilities as well. Cause a young teacher to say, you know what, I can do better on the mainland. Well, you're talking about another issue that has become something that the public is very much aware of, and that is teacher retention. Right. Teacher satisfaction, the shortage of teachers we have in many of our public schools, again, an area to which people suggest let's throw a lot of money. But what you're saying underneath all of this, it's not a money problem necessarily. What's going on in terms of teacher retention and satisfaction? Yeah, I would say it could be a money problem. The point is we don't know. And I say that because I'm not even sure the DOE knows exactly where their $1.9 billion operating budget's going. When you start looking at a teacher and why that teacher is walking out the door inside of five years, there's a host of reasons. But if you're working in a crappy classroom, if you're working with a templated course curriculum that you have no leeway one way or another to kind of be innovative in your own classroom. If you're being completely peppered with extracurricular duties with regards to reporting and testing and answering these templated requirements, you lose your motivation to deliver that after a time. And then when you throw the cost of living perhaps on top of that, it's usually the straw that breaks the camel back. But it's not just money alone. It's actually having those types of innovations in a classroom. If you are a young teacher and you come out of the College of Ed, say here at UH in Manoa, and you have all the passion and zeal by which you went into that profession, and you get into your classroom, and you realize not only do you have the facilities to be able to do that in, but you're being told what to teach, how to teach it, and when to teach it. And you lose a lot of that motivation and passion that you probably had. That doesn't even factor into the fact that if you end up in a classroom that has these kids, children that Dr. Jeffrey Canada just spoke out here from Harlem, these kids are swimming in the deep end of the pool already. And that takes an enormous amount of energy and work and passion for a teacher to deal with that composite on a day-to-day basis. Well, if money may or may not be the problem with teacher retention and there may be issues we have to deal with first. Absolutely. There's probably another area where it should be easier to tell whether money's the problem, and that is our facilities. There's a phenomenal backlog of unrepaired facilities, unfunded liabilities in a sense that the future is gonna have to pay for, work that hasn't been done. And the quality of facilities now that are not just maintained at top standard is a real problem for a lot of teachers. Is this an easy fix by putting money into the system? Because one would say we've got a list of what needs to be done. Let's just figure out how much it costs and pay for it. Is money the answer here? It's not an easy fix, and of course, money always fixes everything sort of. By the way, before you go on, let me mention that you are a former assistant superintendent for the DOE in charge of the DOE's facilities. Yes, so they're very intimate, very passionate about it. But if you look at this model, it's 257 schools spread out across the state. And the way the model divvies up, about half of those schools are in Oahu and the rest of the model, the other half makes up the neighbor islands. 257 schools, average age of those schools is upwards around 70 years. You get some over the century mark. And then if you look at the capital budget on a biennium, which is the way our budget cycles run here, it's about $500 million, so almost $1 billion every two years. Divide that in two annually, about $225 to $275 million a year. Let's say we trust the DOE to come up with its capital budget for that legislative session with its most emergent needs and requirements racked and stacked in the budget that they submit to the Board of Education for approval. Let's say one more time that we trust that the Board of Education knows what they're doing and they're gonna say, you know what, you got it about right. And they send that off to the legislative session with, again, the most emergent needs and requirements of the DOE. And when that facility's budget comes out at the end of a session, it doesn't look anything like what we've already said. We've trusted the DOE as submitting their most urgent needs and requirements because the legislative pork that just gets sure. And you might want a new school in your district or a new cafeteria, but you have been waiting long enough, but we're gonna put a lot of design money in somebody else's district. And you look at the legislators and, of course, they're just trying to do the best for their constituents. But what we've done is we've carved up an inadequate $225 to $250 million capital budget, spread load over 257 schools. And we got very, very good at the 30% solution when we should be striving for the 80 to 90% solution. Not everybody's gonna get their new project built on time, but we gotta start just zeroing in on how effectively are we spending the scant capital budget that we've already got. Well, it looks like you're making your case, at least to me. And that is that when we look at some of these serious problems we all know about student performance, teacher satisfaction, the quality of our facilities. It's not easy to say whether money's the problem. There's a whole range of other issues that are involved, but let's go back to the money question. Sure. Because I just wanna make sure we understand this. Throwing money at these problems is not a clear cut solution. Why is it that we can't tell whether money is the problem? What kind of reporting system is not in place, if you will? What needs to be done? There is no reporting other than if you wanted to go to one of the legislative hearings that had a money committee, ways and means or house finance or one of the education committees where the DOE briefs its budget. It's eye watering, it's a lot of big, big numbers. But there's not one succinct report that comes out that you as a parent or you as a taxpayer or you as a legislator, principal, teacher, whatever, can look at and say how much do we spend at each school? So the Education Institute of Hawaii has taken that project on. We've funded and we will deliver what we call a fiscal transparency study, which looks at all of the data points that you can collect from all of the organizations within the state that do report data, collate it into a very succinct, readable report times 257. In other words, one of these reports for each school where you can look at if your kid is going to a rural school in Maui, you can see per student what that school is getting versus say urban core school in Oahu. But what that does is it's a great decision making tool. If you're a legislator or a principal, wow, there's an equity here that you can see clearly. Well, let me pause right here before you now with you now because we'll come back after a short break and talk a little bit about this fiscal study. But what you're saying fundamentally is that kind of decision making information doesn't exist right now. We can't even tell how much is being spent in certain categories per school or per student. And so it's impossible to make strategic decisions across the board. That's kind of stunning to hear. It is. And when we come back at the top of our program, I'm going to ask you why it is the case. You'd think that in such a large institution that is $1.9 billion of operating expenses and maybe close to $3 billion in the total overall expenses when we throw in facilities and the pensions and health care for the teachers. You'd think that that much money is being watched very carefully. You're suggesting that's not the case. Correct. All right. Well, my guest Ray LaRue is giving me chills when I think about how money is being handled because I'm concerned about the little bit of money that comes into my own household and whether there's enough. And I need precise figures to tell me that so I don't sink. I think we all know what that's like and would hope that our state would operate in the same way. We're going to come back and hear about an innovative project of the education, the whole OIE Institute for Education, which will give decision making power back to the DOE. I'm Kili E. Okina with Ray LaRue. You're watching Hawaii Together on the Think Tech OIE Broadcast Network. Don't go away. Aloha. I'm Warren Pair, a host here at Think Tech Hawaii, a digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii. We are a Hawaii nonprofit that depends on the generosity of its supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you'd go to ThinkTechHawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Thanks so much. Hi, Mabuhay. My name is Amy Ortega Anderson, inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power Hawaii. With ThinkTech Hawaii, we come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch for our mission of empowerment. We aim to enrich, enlighten, educate, entertain, and we hope to empower. Again, maraming, salamat po, Mabuhay, and aloha. Welcome back to Hawaii Together on the ThinkTech Hawaii Broadcast Network. The ThinkTech Hawaii Network produces about 35 hours of original content every week from our studios here in downtown Honolulu. And it goes all over the world. So I want to say thank you to you for watching. My guest today is well known in Hawaii because he's been active politically and he's been active publicly in terms of service to the community. And his passion is to see that our children get the level of education that they deserve and that that takes place through the effective use of the finances that come from taxpayers. Well, we're going to get into a really tough question now. And I'm glad he has the courage with which to respond to it. Please join me with Ray LaRue again, president of the Hawaii Institute for Education. Ray, you have said some pretty serious things. Basically, the Department of Education doesn't have the data it needs in order to tell how effective its spending is. That this massive organization is operating, in a sense, without a clear navigational plan. But let me first ask you, how much money are we talking about? What is the operating budget? The operating budget is about $1.9 billion. And if you were to use that number publicly, you'd be on safe ground. So $1.9 billion. Hawaii people are getting used to figures like that because that's how much more the rail costs next month. So $1.9 billion. But that's not the whole picture because I don't think that includes everything that goes to compensating our faculty and staff in the DOE. It doesn't. And then you've got the capital budget, which we mentioned in the first second. So how much are those other figures? So the other figure is almost another billion dollars so that the entire nut, if you will, which by which the state has to fork over or the taxpayer has to pay to deliver public education to the state, is somewhere around $2.8 billion. So $2.8 billion includes the $1.9 billion operating budget plus the capital improvements, facilities, plus the fringe benefits that are paid for our faculty and staff. Correct. OK. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. I would imagine that that amount of money would demand a high level of reporting within the system. Well, let me just say this from a devil's advocate point of view. There are audits all the time. I mean, there are federal audits because much of the funding is supported by federal grants. There's state audits. The state auditor does his review. There are financial statements audits that tell you that your financial statements are reliable. Doesn't all of this reporting give you the data you need to manage the system? It doesn't. It doesn't. So if you're undergoing a state audit, for instance, I mean, a state audit is going to come in and just make sure that principal Kali Iakina is not taking home a satchel full of money, or it's looking at the phone. Just look at my house and my car. Or that the federal monies, Title I, Title IX monies, are not that there's compliance. In other words, there's malfeasance. There's programatics. The legislature gave us X amount of funding for a specific project. Is it being used correctly? So the audits always come out, and usually they're scathing, or maybe you're not doing it. But there's no corrective action either. There's no department within the state, let alone the Department of Education, that takes all of the data that is available. In other words, student achievement in each school. How many Title I kids? How many schools are on an air conditioning list? When was the last repair and maintenance budget for roofs on each school? If you put that all in a succinct data-driven report, you're going to have a principal who is a leader better apt to make decisions about their school. You're also going to have legislators that can make funding decisions about what specific school when you start looking at equity, for instance. I don't think that it would be a stretch for a parent to want to know how their school is funded, that they're sending their children to, for instance. So I'm hearing you say that data is out there. But it's not collected and collated into a single report or a systematic program that can analyze that data. Correct. I'm also hearing you say that not only is that unavailable at the top level of the DOE, but other stakeholders, such as legislators or parents or actual users, such as principals, don't have access to that systematic data by which to make decisions. So fundamentally, we're not using the data. We're not bringing it together, and we're not analyzing it. Is that what you're saying? That's exactly what I'm saying. So if you listen to the governor, and you listen to the board of education, and you listen to the superintendent, and they're all aligned, the governor pointed the board, and the board hired the superintendent. And they all speak a pretty good game with regards to school empowerment. And everybody has a different definition of what school empowerment is. But if you look at it from a principal's perspective, how can a principal be empowered to run his or her school the way that they see fit for that community given the education requirements of the kids in those seats when they don't have a clear idea of what resources are available to them to then deliver that education? What we're doing at EIH is providing that data in a succinct report such that you can actually tell her school what that student fund, what is the per pupil spending, not only for your English language learners, for your kids that are Title I, which are the kids swimming in the deep end of the pool, where the facility costs are, how they are doing percentage wise on their standardized testing, such that each school has all of that data right there in front of them, which is a great decision-making tool. You know, one of the questions I learned as a debater back in school was, why do good men tolerate evil? And that was the question you asked to get to the heart of why something isn't the way it should be. What's the problem here? We have a clear fiscal duty and a clear fiduciary duty as government leaders and administrators to have the best information and use it well. On a more perhaps political level, what's going on structurally that prevents or has prevented us from having this information? I think one of the biggest hurdles that we have to come get over, and I think it's achievable, is one of trust. And you mentioned the tax ballot question that failed to the Supreme Court, never made it to the ballot, and then recently the rise in GE for education, that also failed. And it's not because I don't think mom and dad don't think that schools need more money because nobody knows, but when you start saying, we're gonna fund education more, that's a good thing, right? But it's really a distrust because nobody knows right now to include legislators, to include taxpayers, to include parents. Where is the $1.9 billion going? And in fact, if you can tell me that first, then let's talk about, okay, maybe more funding is needed or maybe not, but we don't know the answer to that question. So when you start looking at what the problem is, if you get rid of that distrust, in other words, here is how we're spending your tax dollars on public education. Is it enough or is it not enough? We don't know, but if you put that, all that data in front of people that either make decisions or just wanna know, you're gonna get that trust back. You're gonna have or build that confidence that we trust the department to deliver the education that our kids need. Right now that's not there. And until we answer this fiscal equation of where are we spending $1.9 billion, it's not gonna get there. And when you have that distrust between the legislature and one of the departments within this state that spends a big chunk of the state's entire budget, that's not a conducive relationship to build that trust. Now what you're suggesting is that there's a way to eliminate that distrust. And you're not talking about the encounter games or going on picnics together or having a sensitivity retreat between legislators and educators. What you're talking about is actually getting the data that will actually give a clear cut picture as to what's going on. And that can become the objective basis for making decisions. So your organization, the Education Institute of Hawaii is administering a program now to gather this information and to analyze it. You wanna tell us a little bit about that? In fact, we've been working on this for the better part of three years. What is it called? It's called the fiscal transparency study and not to get too technical but it involves a very technical, what they call a quality control business intelligence model where it just takes a lot of data, puts it into one succinct model such that you get decision-making information almost immediately. And the military uses this very kind of process, if you will, for a lot of its intelligence and decision-making models. But we're using our partners on the mainland who are probably some of the most profound voices on school finance and have done this all over North America. And they're our partners. The Education Institute of Hawaii through the graciousness of the Takatani Foundation has funded this. And it's so, for us, it has to happen such that we can put that trust back but more importantly, we've gotta start delivering the education that we know our kids deserve. Do you have a timetable as to when you believe the study may be completed? Yes, in fact, we could have been done yesterday. So we've requested to make this model work, we need the fiscal data from the DOE, which is public information. We've had 14 requests, 12 or 14 requests to the DOE. We've gotten some of that data back, but they've been very slow to deliver a lot of the fiscal data. And this model only operates on all of the data. I can't just have partial data and make the model work. I need all of the data. So we had to go to the 92F process with the Office of Information Practices, basically a public information request. And we're getting that information slowly. If the DOE trusted us, when we're an outsider to them, I think, and we really just wanna help the DOE. In fact, we have no stake in this whatsoever. Once we deliver the model, have at it. It's all yours. Do what you want with it. We're moving on to our next project. Well, what I've seen is a parent, which you are, of a public school graduate wants to improve the system. You've banded together with other stakeholders to do that. Let me let you close with this. And we could talk more and more about this. For hours. And I hope that I can learn a little bit more in future programs about the progress of the report. How do you frame what you're doing? If there are skeptics out there and who say, you're simply trying to attack the system. You're simply trying to tear down. This is critical of the system. What is your response? Well, I'm an optimist, so I would dispute it right off the bat that I'm trying to criticize anybody. So I would put it like this, is that the Education Institute of Hawaii to include myself and every one of the board members, which are all former educators, all we wanna do is get behind the superintendent and push. And you have come out superintendent publicly and said you can't afford your strategic plan as it is written today. Let us help you do that. You're offering a hand of help. Absolutely. Well, on behalf of Hawaii citizens, thank you, Ray, thanks for being on the program. My pleasure, Clee. I hope you've enjoyed listening and learned something from Ray Leroux, president of the Education Institute of Hawaii. Our kids here in Hawaii deserve the very best education, but the only way that's gonna happen is if we use our money wisely. So my hat's off to the Education Institute's plan to do a fiscal review of the system. Keep watching your newspaper and news to see what comes of this. I'll be cheering it on and I hope you will as well. I'm Keely Iaquina, president of the Grassroot Institute. Until next time on Think Tech, Hawaii, aloha.