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Five representatives from the islands traveled to Washington, D.C. this week to try to win $75 million in Race to the Top funds for Hawaii.

Their mission was to explain the numerous promises the Hawaii Department of Education — along with various stakeholders and community leaders — makes in for the much-desired federal education grant. If the team is successful, the funds would be distributed over four years, amounting to a mere 1 percent of the state’s annual education budget.

At best, the state’s worth of reform promises are so expansive that it will be difficult for the department to focus attention on all of the ones it is responsible for. At worst, some of the individual proposals appear unrealistic.

The department’s recent track record for implementing reforms does not instill confidence in its ability to follow through this time. Add to that the state budget crunch and the cutbacks the Hawaii State Board of Education has already made to nearly every existing program, and there’s reason to wonder whether the department can live up to its promises.

The department points out that Washington isn’t looking to the past. It’s focused on the future. The panel of education experts assigned to review Hawaii’s Race to the Top application did not bring up budget problems or Furlough Fridays, interim superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi told reporters in a conference call Tuesday.

Maybe it should have. There are reasons to be skeptical about some of the promises the department is making.

Deja Vu

Take teacher and principal evaluations, for example. Hawaii’s application assures the U.S. Department of Education that the state education department will conduct annual evaluations of all educational officers, including teachers, principals and complex area superintendents.

That would be a huge change that would require an enormous amount of additional work for supervisors. Today, teachers are evaluated only once every five years.

The new evaluations would provide the basis for professional development, tenure, compensation and firing decisions within the department, the application states. Again, that would be a huge change. The department recently admitted that it couldn’t tell Civil Beat how many teachers it had fired in the last five years.

And an earlier effort to implement evaluations for principals is stalled, six years after the Legislature directed the department to hold school leaders accountable for their performance. When asked why, the department cited budget cuts.

The application also promises that the department will continue a monetary incentive program to keep highly qualified teachers in hard-to-staff positions. But just last month the official responsible for the program told Civil Beat such bonuses might end this year due to budget cuts.

How Can We Afford This?

Another questionable aspect of the application is the commitment to implementing a common core curriculum that will align with the recently-adopted common core state standards. Hawaii does not currently have a systemwide curriculum. If it were to adopt one, you’d think it would need some new textbooks, but there’s good reason to doubt whether it has the money to purchase textbooks.

The application also commits Hawaii to developing (or purchasing) interim assessments for all grades in English, math, science and social studies. And it promises to administer end-of-course exams in high school to measure student gains in the sciences, math and history. How much will these assessments and exams cost? Tests are expensive.

Price may be irrelevant though. The education department already can’t afford to sustain its current programs — it just cut 318 positions, 296 for special ed.

A Dose of Reality

Hawaii’s also commits the department to:

• Eliminating achievement gaps between individual groups and all students in state assessment scores, graduation rates and college enrollment by 2018.
 (That goal alone is almost unbelievable. The achievement gap is a state and national issue, one that hasn’t shown itself easy to crack.)
• Raising Hawaii State Assessment scores to 90 percent in reading and 82 percent in math by 2014, from 67 and 49 percent respectively. (Again, those are huge jumps. In the past three years, scores have risen 7 percentage points in reading, 11 in math. The Race to the Top proposal would require scores to increase by 15 percentage in reading and 33 percentage points in math in four years.) It calls for the scores to be 100 percent in both reading and math by 2018. (It’s hard to believe there is a single state or school district with 100 percent student proficiency in any subject.)
• Increasing the percentage of high school graduates who go to college from 51 percent to 62 percent by 2018; and increasing the number who graduate from college by 25 percent by the year 2015.
 (This means that this year’s high school seniors will have to do significantly better at completing college than last year’s.) The most recent data show 15 percent of full-time students who entered the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2002 completed their degrees in four years. Race to the Top calls for 19 percent of next year’s college freshmen to graduate in four years.

Despite these questions, the education department points to the Race to the Top application as a way to rally people around reform.

“I think the Race to the Top has offered the opportunity to gather multiple stakeholders together and have difficult conversations around education reforms,” the interim superintendent said in Tuesday’s conference call. “I think it is an opportunity that is unique and has been very helpful and motivating for all of us.”

It’s undeniable that it’s important to be talking about these education issues. But if we get carried away with high and broad aspirations that aren’t tempered with a healthy dose of reality, we run the risk of burning out from repeated failures. There is no shame in taking small, attainable steps before trying to take the long jump to perfection.