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There’s a leadership crisis at the Charter Schools Administrative Office. The office has had six directors in seven years, with Maunalei Love becoming the latest casualty when she was forced to resign last week.

Love told Civil Beat the problem is an ambiguous governance system with no clear line of accountability. The system made it difficult for her to carry out her responsibilities, she said, and reforming that system should be a central priority for her successor.

“I’m really ready to move on, because the position of the executive director at the Charter School Administrative Office is really in the middle of an extremely hostile environment,” Love told Civil Beat.

Her resignation followed “disagreement over many months with regards to job scope and performance” with the panel that hired her, she wrote in a letter to the charter school community.

Love, whose last day was Friday, was the longest-serving director in the history of the office. Here’s a look at charter schools leadership over the last seven years:

• Jan. 2004 – June 2004:
• June 2004 – Sept. 2004: Steve Hirakami (interim)
• Sept. 2004 – Sept. 2006:
• Sept. 2006 – Dec. 2007: (interim)
• Dec. 2007 – Aug. 2008:
• Sept. 2008 – Feb. 2011: Maunalei Love

The disagreements Love mentioned in her letter stemmed from a lack of clear roles in the charter school system’s governance, she said. Ever since the Board of Education established the Charter School Review Panel in 2007, the line of authority over Hawaii’s 31 charter schools has been jagged, at best.

“There’s not a really clear understanding of all the roles of those groups and bodies,” Love said. “The basic issue here is the structure: The governance system is not working.”

Legend:

• BOE = Hawaii State Board of Education
• DOE = Hawaii Department of Education
• CSAO =
• CSRP =
• LSBs = Local school boards — each charter school has its own local board that oversees school policies

The 12-member review panel is an arm of the Board of Education. It has the authority to approve, deny and revoke school charters, as well as to hire the executive director of the Charter School Administrative Office. The review panel was also charged with adopting and enforcing clear organizational criteria and rigorous educational criteria for charter schools. That left the executive director’s hands tied, Love said.

“People think the executive director of the charter schools office can go tell the charter schools to do something, but that’s not the type of relationship we have,” she explained. “It’s a very difficult position because you have too many chiefs trying to run the show and they’re not always in alignment. Even sometimes in the same group they don’t agree. The system is like a : You take care of and unravel one piece, and in the process another one gets knotted up.”

Review panel chairwoman Ruth Tschumy admitted that the lack of an authority structure could be contributing to the high turnover rate in the administrative office. On the other hand, the review panel had spent the last year discussing how to define the various responsibilities of running the charter system. A unique constellation of groups are involved in the system, she said.

“In particular, we were concerned about her view that the (executive director’s) role is just to advocate for the schools,” Tschumy said. “In fact, the statute says she is to advocate for and manage the charter school system. We had wanted the administrative office to be more proactive in identifying problems they might have and getting them resolved, and particularly in helping the local school boards understand their duties and responsibilities for governance of the school.”

For example, she said that after concern rose about hiring practices at Myron B. Thompson Academy, Love might have supplied charter schools with a paper explaining the state ethics code and how it applies to them in their hiring process.

But Love pointed the finger at the review panel for having much of the authority over the system but no accountability.

“As an authorizer, there are certain things you should be doing, and (the review panel is) not taking care of those responsibilities,” she said.

She is hopeful that her successor will be be able to continue moving charter schools forward, but that the governance issue should be a central priority.

“Accountability is absolutely important and I feel that that’s just as important as everything else that we’re doing,” Love said. “One of the things I am asking is that we just really look at the way the structure is set up. If we don’t take care of it, you’re going to continue having all of these problems with things going on at schools….I want to be able to be proactive so we’re able to take care of things ahead of time. A lot of things positive going on at the schools too but we need to take care of accountability.”

Make Charter Schools a State Department

Love said the line of authority issue could be cleared up if legislators would turn the Charter School Administrative Office into a true state department.

“My office is bigger than about five other state departments,” she said.

The charter school system operating budget of $50 million (not counting federal and other funds) exceeds the operating budgets for the state’s departments of agriculture, Hawaiian home lands, human resource development and commerce and consumer affairs.

She has heard rumblings that the Legislature might assign a task force to look at governance issues in the charter school system.

“But that will be at least two years and I don’t know that the system will survive,” Love said. “Unless they change this, it’s not going to work.”