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In October 2016, Hawaii Board of Education Chair Lance Mizumoto justified the decision not to renew Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi’s contract by stating that it was “an ideal time to transition to new leadership that will help the DOE continue its efforts to reduce the achievement gap and prioritize achievement for all students” .

Some teachers like myself were pleased. Since her appointment in 2010, Matayoshi had presided over policies that removed much of the joy from schools and that emphasized testing and data collection at the expense of teaching and learning.

This week we learned that the new superintendent will likely be one of two products of the current educational Big Box: a nationwide collection of individuals with graduate degrees from institutions (many of them recent startups) that support a transformation of public education according to post-traditional business models – what critics refer to as the “corporate educational reform movement.”

This model – one to which Matayoshi adhered and which was largely responsible for facilitating the national failure that was No Child Left Behind (NCLB) – is founded on the idea that, where public education is “broken,” it can be “fixed” through methods that emphasize top-down standardization and systemic compliance.

That’s precisely the model the state is doing its best to move away from – a desire encapsulated in the Blueprint for Public Education drafted by , as well as in the

A quick Google search on the proposed candidates leaves little room for optimism that either candidate is prepared or likely to jump start Hawaii schools out of their post-NCLB limbo and into the brighter, more wholesome future envisioned by HSTA and the Governor’s Task Force.

Having served as a teacher for a mere six years, Linda Chen now runs an educational consulting company she founded. Such companies are the often profitable derivatives of the same Big Box that gave us NCLB and market canned solutions for diverse challenges within public education.

While Deputy Chief Academic Officer at Boston Public Schools, Chen, according to news reports.

She later served as chief academic officer of the Baltimore School District and followed her boss, Schools CEO Gregory Thornton, shortly after Thornton left the district.  And Chen’s association with him bodes ill for hopes of increased local school control at a time when the Every Student Succeeds Act allows (and Hawaii educators have demanded) more freedom in school-level decision-making.

Earlier in her career, Chen was also involved in an incident reported in the New York Times during her tenure as a New York City school principal. A child was knocked unconscious by another child; blame was assigned to an assistant principal, who was accused of dereliction of duty. with Chen’s handling of the incident.

The other finalist, Christina Kishimoto, is superintendent of the Gilbert, Arizona public schools. She has never been a teacher, principal or vice principal.

In her previous job as superintendent of the Hartford, Connecticut schools,

Previously she had received a negative evaluation from that board for her performance during the 2011-2012 school year. , Kishimoto “did not consistently manage [. . .] dynamics that required highly effective leadership, relationship building and operational management.”

with their lack of say in major decisions that took place during Kishimoto’s tenure, the Hartford Courant reported.

Perhaps none of this information in itself provides sufficient grounds for barring either candidate from consideration. The supervision of school systems is obviously an enormous task, and one suspects that there are relatively few superintendents who haven’t met with public disapproval at one time or another.

It is disconcerting, however, that, for candidates on whom a cursory Internet search casts such an unfavorable light, we’ve traded an eminently qualified local candidate in – a trade we owe in part to the meddling largesse of the Castle Foundation, which suspended its $50,000 funding for the search after Galera announced his candidacy only to hand it right back immediately after he withdrew.

Moreover, there were plenty of other qualified Hawaii educators that have served Hawaii schools for many years and earned a good bit of public and professional esteem on the shortlist of candidates from which Chen and Kishimoto were chosen.

In recent months, the board has given lip service to several ideals widely embraced by professional teachers if not by the Big Box corporate “reformers.” But the two candidates chosen as finalists show how little real commitment the board has to such ideals.

The local educational community has requested candidates with deep teaching experience, extensive personal knowledge of Hawaii and its public school system, a collaborative mindset, and a commitment to teacher empowerment. The board’s selections demonstrate failure to acknowledge the input they solicited on their own survey.

It may seem hyperbolic to ask for some sort of an explicit mandate for board members to do what is right. But perhaps because board members are appointed rather than elected, they don’t appear to be particularly concerned about holding themselves accountable to community opinion.

Through the various missteps reported in the media over the past months, it has become clear that an appointed Board is not serving the interests of Hawaii schools and the children they serve.

Perhaps it is time to return to a Board elected by and responsible to voters. Maybe then the board will listen to teachers. As former Governor Abercrombie learned in his 2014 loss to David Ige, teachers vote.