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If Gov.-elect David Ige is serious about his assertion to halt implementation of poorly designed aspects of the Educator Effectiveness System, he should start with standardized testing and linking scores from it to teacher evaluation.

“As your Governor, I will work with the Board (of Education) to immediately place a hold on the components of the Educator Effectiveness System (EES) that educators have identified to be part of poor design and implementation until we are able to re-assess and come up with a more responsible solution that builds morale, capacity, and professionalism,” Ige states in an open letter to teachers dated July 16.

While cynics may view his statement as just another empty promise made by an ambitious politician running for office, teachers were willing to take him at his word, despite having helped to elect other governors who did not honor their promises.

Teachers endorsed, campaigned, and voted for Ige, primarily recognizing him as humble, objective, and compassionate, a father whose children were educated in public schools, not private, as is the case for the vast majority of elected leaders in our state government. Further strengthening teacher support was the knowledge that his wife, Dawn, made a career of teaching and administrating public schools on Oahu.

Meanwhile his running mate, Lt. Gov. Shan Tsutsui, worked shoulder to shoulder with this writer and other band parents to load musical instruments and props, and help set up Baldwin High’s homecoming half-time show at War Memorial Stadium in Wailuku. One of his daughters was my student once upon a time, and she played saxophone in that half-time show. Her younger siblings are enrolled in classes at my school.

Both men have a stake in public education. Both believe in it, and have proven it. So it is that we in public education so hope that they can see what the state Board of Education apparently cannot, that to which Department of Education bureaucrats cast a blind eye.

It is, and always has been primarily one thing. As former President Bill Clinton had framed, only he was referring to the economy, “It’s the test, stupid!”

Yes, it is the standardized tests. Those “snapshots” of how our children are learning in our public schools, and now, how well our teachers are teaching them. Well, most professional photographers will rail against referring to their work as “snapshots,” and so in a similar vein, will teachers objects to non-professional methods of measuring both learning and teaching.

Truth is, there is no one, singular method of accurately gauging education across the board, be it for learning or teaching. Anybody who would tell it differently is a fool or liar, putting it in plain English.

Common Core. Who’s it for? The education industry. The companies making obscene profits selling the tests, the textbooks, and the rest of the hoopla they say teachers cannot be without. And it is sure to be a lot easier to print up identical, standardized versions for all the children of America, their differences innate to the locale and cultures be damned.

Big business has taken over our public schools. Gov. Neil Abercrombie filled the first appointed school board allowed by law with suits from the business sector, people who would make public school policy via a business model. Numbers in, numbers out.

Who was appointed our schools’ superintendent? A former teacher? A principal? No, a lawyer, Kathryn Matayoshi. And she obviously has bought into the “business model” concept, because she has become disciple to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who takes great pride in his attempts to convert, or subvert, public education with his unholy alliance with the education industry when it comes to standardized testing and linking teacher evaluations to the scores.

Both Duncan and Matayoshi are backing away some, as voices everywhere are shouting their disdain for their methods. The billionaire think tank that got Common Core off the ground even advises caution.

Numbers. No one dare characterize the children of Ige and Tsutsui as such.

My students are not numbers. Yet the DOE sees them as such, and coldly projects the numbers to diminish with the onset of Common Core as the basis for standardized testing this year.

On any given day, my “numbers” at my Title I school, in my classroom with 80 percent classified as from low-income families, may not have been fed prior to coming to school. They may not have slept. They may have been abused. If it is test day on that given day, how well are they going to stack up? Who, then, would want responsibility for teaching them if they are to be evaluated on a student’s inability to conform with the standards set by those whose prime interests lay with bottom line numbers?

Who, in their right mind, would call this reform? Enough is enough. We are not standardized test scores!