Posted 8:22 AM by Susan Darst Williams

HAWAII’S STATE-RUN SCHOOLS: WORTH AN ‘ALOHA'?

Somebody wrote in to The World-Herald Public Pulse Thursday and proposed that Nebraska chuck all its public-school districts run by individual school boards and administrations, and go with one statewide school district, like Hawaii.

There’s just one answer for that suggestion: THROW THAT GUY INTO A RAGING VOLCANO!

Reasons why:

-- Hawaii has among the nation’s worst schools. Nearly half of their fourth-graders and eighth-graders scored below a basic level of competence on a national math exam recently. See http://www.ncpa.org/iss/edu/pd101201a.html

-- Parents with money have long since abandoned the public schools in the Aloha State, leaving them disproportionately full of disadvantaged children with problems. Hawaii has one of the highest levels of private-school enrollment in the country, at more than 20%.

-- Educators have no say-so in budgeting, who’s going to be hired as a teacher, and where they are going to teach. It’s all done by the governor and state legislature.

The main reason his plan wouldn’t hold up, even in a Nebraska-sized bikini, is that it eliminates representative government.

With state-run schools, you lose any semblance of local control by getting rid of all those elected school boards.

If you have a beef about something in your child’s school, there’s nobody local who can do anything about it. You have to go to the State Capitol and meet with a faceless, heartless, spineless, brainless, upless, downless educrat.

Rots o’ ruck. It’d be kind of like doing a hula in a grass skirt in front of a herd of cattle. You’d put a lot of energy into it . . . but all you’d get would be . . . well . . . bull.