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No one had anything bad to say about measures to boost civic education and media literacy in Hawaii during the last legislative session. 

Certainly not Rep. Amy Perruso, the bills’ co-sponsor, who said, “Citizens are not born, they are made and and they have to be taught these skills.”

Not teachers union lobbyist Laverne Moore, who testified at a hearing, “We want our students to be ready for the real world.”

And not the Department of Education or the University of Hawaii, even though they wanted more money to implement some of the proposals.

Not even the chairs of the Legislature’s money committees, who killed the bills with the silent treatment.

“I don’t think we’ve done a good enough job helping the money chairs to understand the situation in social studies and civics in the public schools, because if they understood it, they would definitely have passed those measures,” Perruso said.

One proposal would have funded the hiring of two full-time civic education specialists to help train Hawaii’s instructors on how to teach the subject. That responsibility currently falls to a single specialist in social studies, a much-broader content area.

A second would have pushed for more instruction in media literacy at a time when misinformation is rampant, sometimes at the highest levels of government.

A third would have enabled the Legislature’s Public Access Room to hire someone to develop an “outreach and engagement program” in cooperation with DOE and UH to help students better understand what goes on at the State Capitol.

Perruso would have dearly loved to avail herself of all these resources when she was a social studies teacher at Mililani High School. Guidance regarding curriculum and materials was severely lacking then and “sadly, nothing has changed,” she said.

It’s not as if there aren’t other efforts afoot to improve civic engagement in Hawaii. Perruso is vice-chair of perhaps the highest profile of those, the Commission to Promote and Advance Civic Education.

PACE was established in 2021 by the state Supreme Court and is working with the DOE to establish a Schools of Democracy program that could create some model schools for civic education.

Ultimately, Perruso said, any effort to truly reform Hawaii’s state and county governments depends on adequate civic education and media literacy.

Citizens “cannot possibly own any reforms that they don’t understand and they can’t understand reforms if they don’t understand how the system works,” she said.

Here’s a look at the recent civic education proposals in the Legislature and what happened to them last session:

Training The Teachers

To best understand the need for to fund two full-time civic education resource specialists, consider that it’s been eight years since the DOE adopted C3 (College, Career and Civic Life), a widely used framework for teaching social studies to foster more civic-mindedness in students.

“It’s actually a work of art,” Perruso said of C3. “And it’s amazing that we were able to rewrite our social study standards so that they align with this framework. The problem is that teachers have not subsequently received any training on how to make that shift to the C3 framework, which is, you know, a pretty substantive shift that is going to require changes in strategies that many of our teachers are not ready for yet. Without support for our teachers in making that shift, the standards are just basically a piece of paper.”

HB 741 represented “a significant step toward improving civic education in Hawaii’s public schools,” testified Colin Moore, a political science professor with the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization, during a House Education Committee hearing. “We know that there’s a significant shortage of resources in the professional development of teachers to teach civics.”

Laverne Moore of the Hawaii State Teachers Association testified the specialists could help ensure that young people “have the skills to engage in the working of democracy, be able to practice democratic citizenship like writing and submitting testimony and testifying at the Legislature in the pursuit of a better Hawaii.”

In , DOE Superintendent Keith Hayashi said the specialists would provide “much-needed support to help students become critical consumers of information; take civic action such as voting, volunteering, and serving in leadership positions; increase informational literacy skills; and participate fully in the community.”

The bill was unanimously passed by the Education Committee, with Chair Justin Woodson that  “in the 2020 general election, 40 states had a higher voter turnout than Hawaii. This measure appropriates funds to the Department of Education to increase access to civic education in Hawaii’s public school systems to increase voter turnout and citizen engagement over the long term.”

It was referred on Feb. 16 to the House Finance Committee, where it was ignored by Chair Kyle Yamashita for the remaining two and a half months of the session. A companion measure, , received no hearing at all in that chamber.

Greater Emphasis On Media Literacy

“Through this bill, students will be trained to filter out misinformation, disinformation, digital discrimination and online hate speech,” gushed the in its in support of to “authorize” the Department of Education to expand its teaching of media literacy across all subject fields.

The DOE’’s Hayashi agreed that “it is imperative for all students to be educated in media literacy,” but his written testimony said the department already has an “action plan” for digital citizenship that includes media literacy at all grade levels.

“I think that the way the department interpreted the legislation was strange, and we should have had better conversations about it,” said Perruso. “The intent of that measure was to really help kids unpack this information and misinformation and look at all the ways in which people are trying to mislead others using media.”

Teaching critical thinking skills “is actually best addressed in all subjects,” Perruso said. “It’s in their (DOE) standards, but it’s it’s not explicit and intentional enough in terms of desired outcomes.”

The differing points of view didn’t derail the bill, which reached the House Finance Committee on the same day as HB 741. Again Yamashita ignored the proposed reforms  for the rest of the session, and the Senate never did take up a companion measure, .

Learning At The Legislature

The at the Capitol already provides a valuable link between state government and citizens, and proposed to strengthen that link — especially with students. The measure would have funded an additional full-time employee to establish an outreach and engagement program for K-12, post-secondary, and community education.

“This would have a significant impact in reaching and educating students and citizens across the state about the Legislature,” the PACE commission stated in . “The more direct contact that students, educators and citizens can have with the Legislature, and the more they can see the process in action, the more they will understand and want to participate in this key part of our democracy.”

As the recovery from COVID continues, “teachers have slowly started bringing their students back to the Capitol,” Perruso said. “But there’s no curriculum around it. There’s no organization to the tours. The students don’t get much in the way of content when it is an ideal opportunity to teach them about the differences perhaps between the House and the Senate and the role the governor plays.”

The new PAR staffer would have been required to reach out to the DOE and the University of Hawaii to establish educational partnerships. Interestingly, neither the DOE nor UH provided written testimony on the bill until it was amended to require them to take part in those partnerships. Then they both for their own additional positions.

Perruso found those requests reasonable, but she also saw promising potential in just adding the PAR position.

“If the right person was found, there’s such deep, rich history, not just of the Capitol, but of constitutionalism in Hawaii,” she said. “And I think that our students are not exposed enough to people who are familiar with that history.”

HB 1192 actually progressed much further than the other two civic education measures, clearing Yamashita’s Finance Committee and then the full House on unanimous votes.

It was ultimately halted by Sen. Angus McKelvey, but like the others it basically fell victim to a money committee chair. McKelvey’s Government Operations Committee had already approved the Senate’s companion measure, , which was then ignored by Ways and Means Committee Chair Donovan Dela Cruz.

Noting the WAM roadblock, McKelvey said there was no reason to further consider either measure, adding, “They can pick it up next year.”

Perruso intends to do just that.

“This, I think, is why I ran for office,” said the former teacher. “What I think I can contribute to the common good is an emphasis on service and civic education.”