Elected Ed Board Member Supports Appointed Board
She calls the Hawaii State Board of Education disjointed, dysfunctional, dictatorial and (without trying to alliterate) directionless. The best cure, she says, is to make the board an appointed body.
The comments come from a surprising source: Donna Ikeda, one of the board’s own elected members.
Ikeda first got involved in education as a concerned mom, then as a state legislator for 22 years and finally as an elected board member. Her four-year term expires this year and she has no plans to run again.
“In all those years, no matter what we did, no matter what we’d try — and it’s funny because they talk about education reform and reinventing education today, and we’ve tried that many, many times — nothing has gotten better,” Ikeda told Civil Beat.
From Ikeda’s perspective, the board has become mired in petty politics. And without an effective board, even the most well-intentioned reforms for Hawaii’s schools will go nowhere. Voters will decide in November whether to replace the elected board with an appointed one.
Her political involvement began in the early ’70s when she fought the consolidation of her children’s school — Kamiloiki Elementary School — with an intermediate school. The 11-month battle led her to a researcher job with the state Legislature, and eventually, she ran for office. She served in the Hawaii State House of Representatives from 1974-85 and in the Hawaii State Senate from 1986-96.
If you had asked her to run for the education board while she was a legislator, Ikeda would have said, “No way. You’re crazy.” Even then, the Legislature had trouble dealing with the board, she said. But after leaving her state Senate seat, Ikeda thought she might understand better why education wasn’t improving if she took a look at the system from the inside.
She won an elected position for the Oahu district on the board in the year 2000. She won a second time in 2006.
It was the second time she thought “‘What have I gotten myself into?'” she said1. “These people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats. I thought I saw everything when I was a legislator, but I’ve never seen such pettiness in my whole life.”
Even during her first stint on the board, though, board leaders would dominate the meetings and ignore other members’ requests to put items on the agenda. Former board member Breene Harimoto had a binder several inches thick stuffed with unfilled requests.
Because of Sunshine Laws, any item the board takes action on must be on the agenda, which is made public in advance of a meeting.
“You had a dysfunctional, disjointed board that wasn’t taking the lead on anything, so there was no direction. And there wasn’t any accountability either. Everybody was pointing fingers at each other,” Ikeda said.
Winning a Board Seat — Without Campaigning
Ikeda resigned from the board after two years to run for lieutenant governor. She wanted to gather a consortium of voices to help define and reform the education system. Her campaign turned out to be more idealistic than practical, she said, and she lost the race.
“I thought ‘That’s it, I’m done. I’m not going to deal with this anymore,'” she said. “I really meant it.”
But her retirement didn’t last long. A friend convinced her to run for the education board a second time in 2006. She reluctantly submitted the paperwork and the 25 signatures required by the state, which the friend had gathered while Ikeda was out of town. Although Ikeda attended forums and answered questionnaires, she did almost no campaigning — and yet she won.
But her return to the board changed nothing. Last year’s Furlough Fridays situation only colored her perception of the board more, because the board’s two negotiators did not communicate well with board members and were “dictatorial.” She said in at least one case, the chairman and negotiator made a significant bargaining decision without consulting board members.
Ikeda’s frustration surfaced in last Thursday’s general meeting at Kapolei Elementary School when she criticized Board Chairman Garrett Toguchi for his unilateral decision to fire the board’s executive director. She likened his actions to those of a dictator.
Right now, she says, the board is split with some members who seem to care and others who are caught up in power struggles and politics. She tried to unite them under some specific common goals when she was board chairman in 2008, but she said the only members who showed up to help craft the goals were the ones who already shared her perspective.
She was critical of the board’s most recent tactic of seeking public input on what qualities a superintendent should have: The exercise will only produce more buzzwords and can’t serve as a substitute for board members aligning their goals.
“That’s not going to move the system,” she said of the survey. “That’s not going to change test scores.”
In order to attract candidates who will get things done, the board’s expectations and goals have to be very specific, she said, with measurable outcomes.
As a legislator, Ikeda introduced a bill to abolish the elected board every year, but it received little attention and never passed. This year, she said, the chairman and chief negotiator’s2 poor handling of Furlough Fridays helped a similar bill pass.
“I’ve said this publicly during board member concerns,” she said with irony. “‘I congratulate you, Mr. Chair, because in 22 years I introduced legislation to change this whole setup and reform the department and get rid of the board. And the bill never got heard; never moved. But in one short year, you have been able to bring this right to the forefront.'”
Toguchi, the board chairman, told Civil Beat that Ikeda has become jaded by her early attempts to abolish the elected board.
“She said she has tried for many years to create an appointed board rather than an elected one,” he said. “So already going into elected board, her perception was one-sided.”
Taking Cues from the University of Hawaii’s Board of Regents
Ikeda said her second election — which she won without campaigning — is a good example of why an appointed board makes more sense. Otherwise, she said, “people will vote primarily on the basis of name recognition.”
“So while the concept of an elected board is appealing, people are not really exercising their right to make an informed choice. And I think that’s one reason why the board is so dysfunctional.”
But the same comments could be made about any elected office, Toguchi told Civil Beat.
“You think you’re voting for someone with the best qualifications, but people vote based on all kinds of things, and that’s the right of the voter,” Toguchi said.
Instead of focusing energy on replacing an elected board with an appointed one, Toguchi said what’s needed is better funding and resources for candidates to educate voters about their positions.
Some of the board’s problems could be solved by providing it with more authority and autonomy to make decisions like how and where it gets its funding, he added. Moreover, Toguchi said, a board that is independent of the Legislature has the advantage of being more transparent.
An appointed board would likely consist of members who agree with the governor who selected them, Ikeda said. Defenders of an elected board say it follows that an appointed board would be hamstrung by even greater politics than the existing one, Ikeda said. But the process for appointing Board of Education members — detailed in a bill which was vetoed this month by Gov. Linda Lingle — is the same one used to appoint members to the University of Hawaii‘s Board of Regents.
A selection committee would screen names and then recommend candidates to the governor. The governor would have to pick her appointments from among the recommendations, and then the state Senate would have to confirm them.
“That’s no picnic,” Ikeda said. “The process is grueling, and I can only speak for myself, but I can tell you that if I went through a process like that and got appointed, I wouldn’t feel like I had to follow everything the governor did or wanted. Although not at complete philosophical odds, any rational person would believe that there would be disagreements.”
‘An Elected Office I Don’t Believe In’
Even if voters agree this November with Ikeda that an appointed board will better serve students, it could be several months before appointees replace the current board members — and the seven new members who will be elected on the same ballot.
Either way, Ikeda’s name will not be on the ballot. She has lost faith in an elected board’s ability to serve Hawaii’s students.
“I’m not running again, because I can’t,” she said. “I can’t in good conscience run for an elected office that I don’t believe in.”
Instead, she will probably work with Hawaii Education Matters to promote and educate others about the constitutional amendment for an appointed board.
She would, in any case, advise her successor to “get out the battle gear.”
“It’s not easy,” she said. “I used to be a lot tougher I guess when I was younger, but I can’t help but be bothered by what I’ve seen.”
