Ambitious performance goals for the state cannot be achieved without fundamentally restructuring the educational system. Systemic reform must replace piecemeal efforts that fix a few problems but leave the system unchanged. Hawaii is making progress on systemic reform, but changing all the pieces of the system, from preschools through lifelong learning, is a monumental task.

The challenge, then, is to create a policy environment in which all children, youth and adults succeed in school and beyond.

Systemic change involves redesigning the education system, from birth through lifelong learning, in a coordinated coherent fashion to focus on results. The comprehensive agenda for reform must be more than a vision. It must be a strategic plan, a blueprint for changing people's attitudes and behaviors, requiring top-down support for bottom-up reform.

Setting this agenda for educational reform requires strong leadership.

To genuinely improve education at the school level, the public must be involved in the process of reform.

Such being the case, implementing a systemic reform agenda is a long-term project. It must be championed from the statehouse to the schoolhouse. Reform is not an event, but an ongoing process. It must focus on students and improve the learning environment. It requires strong, organized support for continuity of effort spanning across administrations.

Hawaii cannot change its education system overnight. Progress toward change cannot be maintained without a consistent vision of goals that spans administrations and political tides. One way for Hawaii to demonstrate long-term commitment to the process of reform is to sustain support for change through challenging learning goals.

Current state efforts to restructure education must also be defined to focus on rigorous and challenging academic standards for all students. Those standards must pinpoint what students need to know and be able to do, which are the centerpiece of systemic education reform.

Moreover, state standards must be developed with all parties within the community in order to reflect true ownership of those standards. National and state standard-setting efforts must move in tandem in order to establish standards in mathematics, science, geography, history, civics, English, the arts, foreign language, and interdisciplinary subjects.

Assessment is a key component of systemic reform efforts. It creates a link among many of the primary goals of education reform, which include a focus on curriculum and classroom instruction, local accountability, high standards for achievement, and a belief that all children can learn at high levels.

Assessment tools should accurately measure performance, include all students in assessment measures, and focus on challenging content and skills. They should foster a close link between curriculum and instruction, while providing meaningful and accurate information to individuals at all levels of the education system.

The fundamental building blocks for successful educational accountability systems are:

• develop consensus on clear and measurable goals that describe intended results;
• utilize multiple assessment tools that measure progress toward these goals;
• design assessment tools to help teachers improve student learning as well as provide benchmarks for comparing student and school performances;
• create mechanisms for providing information on student and school performance to policy makers, parents, and the public;
• create an environment in which educators are trusted and feel they can utilize assessment tools to implement change;
• provide assistance to educators to change unsuccessful practices and implement alternatives; and
• provide incentives that recognize success and ensure adjustments in the case of failure.

Performance reporting through school "report cards" has been introduced in more than thirty states to raise the stakes for school performance. Hawaii should move forward in this area.

Flexibility and autonomy are central to systemic reform. If school level educators are to be held accountable for results, they must be able to innovate in their classrooms and experiment with plans to increase student performance. Hawaii must create an environment that provides incentives for innovation, permits local decision-making, and assists schools to implement and experiment with reform.

Deregulation relies upon the development of result-based goals and related policies on assessment, materials, and professional development. Oversight of the local accountability system can then replace process regulation as the primary state role in education. Deregulation without these elements may create freedom without accountability. The existing regulatory environment may stifle creativity by focusing on process rather than results.

The recent history of SCBM and other decentralization efforts indicates that the people involved in decision at the school -- teachers, administrators, and parents -- need assistance to focus school authority on improving student performance. SCBM efforts also need to be more closely tied to the allocation of budget authority to ensure that the delegation of decision-making authority is accompanied by the power to act upon these decisions.

Systemic reform changes the basis of educational success from input measures and compliance with procedures to output measures particularly student performance. This shift in focus places significant responsibility for accountability and innovation at the school level. At the same time, it challenges the state department of education to change its role from one of regulation and monitoring to one of helping schools improve education.

The task for Hawaii is to create a responsive state education agency that supports a decentralized, results-based system. School staffs will be the locus of decision-making and assessment. The education department must become their resource centers, providing leadership, information, and assistance rather than policing their actions. The department of education must shift from being control-oriented to become service-oriented as it relates to schools.

Who is responsible for education in Hawaii? Too many entities with good intentions are prescribing solutions to educators in order to improve the quality of education. The sum total of these actions creates confusion and mixed results at best.

Today, our schools are surrounded by numerous laws, rules, regulations, policies, and procedures that dictate what they can and cannot do. Flexibility and innovation are restricted.

Roles and responsibilities of the governor, legislature, Board of Education, Department of Education, state agencies, and public employee unions must be redefined in order to empower schools. Roles and responsibilities must be restructured by asking each entity: What value can you add to the school and students?

Reform and restructuring means insuring that existing resources are utilized efficiently and effectively. Money must be provided directly to the schools through school-based budgeting so that educators responsible for improving student learning have adequate resources to accomplish their mission.

Programs designed to improve student learning are best developed by those directly involved and responsible for student learning, not state policymakers. That means schools must be empowered with greater flexibility and autonomy.

Hawaii's students are entitled to adequate facilities that are conducive to promoting a sound learning environment. It is not only necessary to provide more resources to meet the facilities needs of Hawaii's students, but it is important to rethink and redesign systems that are responsible for constructing schools in such a way as to maximize existing resources.

Services integration and interagency collaboration must be sought in order to improve the delivery of services to children and families. These strategies must be implemented under the auspices of education agencies in partnership with social service agencies and other organizations to ensure that all students are ready for school, and to improve the academic performance of all students. State efforts focus on two broad categories: a)linking health, early childhood education, and parenting programs to foster school readiness and b) establishing school-based or school-linked services to provide appropriate interventions to children and adolescents.

Clearly, a systemic approach to education reform must involve all levels of the education system, including higher education, because developments in one sector affect developments in all other sectors. There is mounting agreement that the higher education sector should not be exempt from reform initiatives. The quality of undergraduate education has suffered from an overemphasis on research, from overspecialization of curriculum and instruction, and from graduate students working as undergraduate instructors.

Improving the accountability of higher education has been a central issue for state policymakers. Policymakers should start asking about the implementation of performance-based student assessments, development of institutional "report cards" which include information on graduate rates, faculty advising and teaching loads, and assessment results.

The challenges are encouraging higher education's involvement in workforce preparation, encouraging collaboration with other partners to reform schools, competency-based admissions, improving undergraduate education, and challenging higher education to transform teacher preparation.

We must strive to create a system that provides parents with a choice in placing their children in settings that are developmentally appropriate for meeting their children's educational needs. We must insure that students entering schools are ready to learn and, at the same time, insure that schools are ready for those students.

The state, however, must be cautious in creating another bureaucracy in an attempt to deliver early childhood services. We must work towards providing opportunities for private providers in each community to design programs that best meet the needs of students in their respective communities.

Public school choice encompasses a range of proposals that broaden educational opportunities and options for some or all students. choice plans may include full interdistrict and intradistrict choice; school within school models; postsecondary options; partnership schools; and alternative education opportunities.

The system must recognize that no one specific program can meet all the educational needs of students. Giving parents, students, and educators opportunities to develop and implement programs to help improve student learning therefore must be expanded.