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Hawaii State Board of Education Chairman Don Horner says the nearly 60 percent of voters who have no confidence in the Hawaii Department of Education‘s ability to deliver on Race to the Top promises might want to revise their opinion next month.

That’s when the department is expected to present its long-term strategic plan to the board for approval.

A Civil Beat poll recently found that likely voters in Hawaii shared the federal Department of Education’s skepticism about the state living up to its word.

While both the board and department could do a better job at communicating with the public, Horner said, they are hard at work not only to meet federal promises but to make sweeping culture changes in the education system. Voters will get their chance to see for themselves and give the department and board a grade in March, he said.

Meanwhile, Horner gave Civil Beat a preview this week of some of the major accomplishments since the appointed board took office nine months ago. Horner is the first chair of the nine-member board appointed by the governor after voters in 2010 rejected an elected ed board.

“First of all, it’s not about Race to the Top,” he said of the reforms the school district is working on. The $75 million federal grant, in his opinion, is only a small piece of the overall puzzle of how to improve Hawaii’s public schools.

What it is about: Culture change, which needs to start with the leaders figuring out where they are and where they are going.

“A substantial part of a strategic plan is self-assessment,” he explained. “You have to figure out where you are before you can determine what direction you need to go. There’s a lot we can do to improve the education system — and must do. But we need to be deliberate about it.”

The board and department held their first-ever retreat in December to do just that.

‘To-Do’ and ‘Done’

Horner keeps a running “to-do” list on his iPad of initiatives and projects the school district needs to tackle, and a checklist of things the board and department have done. The list is several pages long, and he discussed highlights from it as he scrolled down to show how busy they are. The items on the lists, he said, are not insignificant.

“We restructured the whole damn organization,” he said, referring to an announcement in December that the department would be split into two distinct divisions for academics and operations.

The restructuring also involved rewriting the job description for the state’s 15 complex area superintendents, each of whom oversees all the public schools in a given geographic area.

“Before, they were just administrators,” Horner said of the complex area superintendents. “That’s just wrong. They are educational leaders and they needed the authority to make decisions for their districts. People — teachers, principals, parents — used to bring all of their complaints to the Board of Education, but now they go to their complex area superintendent. Frankly, I believe that before, these folks were undermined. Now we have a longitudinal line of community-specific authority.”

The new board also reorganized its committees, implemented a response process for complaints and performed a thorough risk assessment, he said. And now the board requires the department to provide more frequent and thorough reports on its own operations.

“We tore apart the bylaws, we introduced community meetings and we’ve improved our relationships with stakeholders. HEE (Hui for Excellence in Education) loves us.”

The new board and the department have also focused on improving the human resources office to provide better support for teachers and principals. The department is practically ready to implement principal performance evaluations, he said, and is ready to move on teacher evaluations as soon as they are no longer subject to collective bargaining negotiations. (Principal evaluations were mandated eight years ago.)

Helping teachers and principals to develop and grow as professionals will lead to the student achievement we all want, he said.

Meanwhile, student scores are up on both the state assessment and a national assessment, the board has passed the adopted by all but five other states, and the state now has a digital system for storing and tracking information on students.

“Before, the information on these students — truancy records, grades, etc — was kept in paper files,” he said.

Although Horner is pleased with the accomplishments so far, he acknowledged that the district has a long way to go. But he warned against trying to judge the board and department too early or with the wrong expectations.

“The public education system does not move at the same pace as a business system,” said Horner, who was CEO of First Hawaiian Bank for seven years until his retirement in December and remains the bank’s chairman. “And it shouldn’t. That’s a good thing. We’ve had too many false starts, and we as a board chose not to react to every issue, but to proact. We’ve done our best to be deliberate, intentional and careful.”