Sneaking up on education
January 24th, 2008 by Jerry BurrisNo question most of the attention paid to Gov. Lingle’s State-of-the-State speech was on her challenging proposal to buy the Turtle Bay resort to save it from further development.
But there are a lot of other ideas on Lingle’s plate this year that will stir up controversy, debate and serious soul-searching by the majority Democrats in the House and Senate.
Take, for instance, a pair of education proposals that would radically reshape the way our public school system looks today.
The first was a familiar one. After keeping the idea on the back burner for a while, Lingle has returned full force with her local school boards plan, in the form of a proposed Constitutional amendment that would let each county decide if it should have a local school board.
Democrats have rejected that idea in the past and are likely to do so again. They have their own plan which shifts greater autonomy to local school managers in a different way.
But Lingle is likely to say she is back to her original idea because the Democratic plan simply hasn’t worked as touted. That criticism may be a stretch, but watch for another robust debate over how our schools will be run,
And even if this idea goes nowhere, another proposal, if passed, would alter our public schools dramatically in a different way.
This is the proposal to grant autonomy and power to the Charter School Panel, thus taking it out of the jurisdictional shadow of the Department of Education which has not been wildly enthusiastic about charter schools.
The other part of the plan would take off the legal limit on the number of charter schools allowed, along with the funding necessary to get any and all of these new schools launched. One scenario would see the state’s public education system reshaped from within as dozens and dozens of new charters emerge, leaving the regular system with less to work with and more headaches to solve.
Is this what we want?
